On December 23, 1783, George Washington appeared before Congress in Annapolis and resigned his commission as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Having won American independence, he surrendered his authority and returned home.

Washington’s resignation demonstrated something essential about the nation he had helped create: military victory did not confer political ownership. The country belonged to its people, and though Washington could have used his service to seize control of the new country he helped form, he stepped aside instead.

Six years later, with the Constitution of the United States ratified, George Washington was elected President of the United States and brought back into public service. Galled by ceremony or deference bordering on slavish or royal, he invented the most modest title possible in an age of emperors: “Mr. President.” He then served eight years, and then shocked the nation by stepping aside again to set the precedent that presidents do not serve for life.

George Washington was not a perfect man, but he was a classical liberal. Our country was, in fact, founded from the ground up on classical liberal values, and, if we wish to remain free, it is to classical liberalism that we must again turn.

Classical liberalism is not a phrase I can find in my American Heritage Dictionary, but it is in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which calls it

an early form of liberalism, the political-philosophical doctrine which holds that the central problem of politics is the protection of individual freedom or liberty. The term classical liberalism may also refer to actual political systems that instantiate classical-liberal principles.

The Encyclopedia Britannica goes on to say:

Both classical liberalism, which was first articulated in England in the mid-17th century, and modern liberalism, which was predominant in western Europe, North America, and elsewhere for much of the 20th century, hold that government is necessary to prevent individuals from being harmed by others. They also recognize that a necessary role of government is the provision of public services that private businesses are incapable of performing fairly or efficiently, such as law enforcement, education, health care, national security, and sanitation. All forms of liberalism, however, seek to limit the powers of government, because government itself can pose a threat to individual freedom. The problem that liberalism in general addresses, then, is that of devising a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual freedom but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

The problem is compounded when one asks whether this is all that the government can or should do on behalf of individual freedom. Contemporary liberals in the classical tradition—the so-called “neoclassical” liberals, or libertarians—answer that it is. Modern liberals, however, have insisted that the powers of government can promote as well as protect the freedom of the individual. Indeed, according to modern liberalism, the chief task of government is to remove obstacles that prevent individuals from living freely or from fully realizing their potential—obstacles such as poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance.

I agree with the Encyclopedia Britannica that there was a form of liberalism that dominated the twentieth century. “Modern liberalism” as the Encyclopedia defines it involves a supposed freedom from want in which the government assumes the power to provide, and, for the government to give something to one person, it must necessarily take it from someone else.

Over the past 26 years, modern liberalism has gone even further, limiting opportunity for some on the assumption that it can provide opportunity for others. Still, opportunity is not a commodity like bread. Removing opportunity from one person does not necessarily provide usable opportunity for someone else. The best the government can do in this capacity is to give jobs to people who are unqualified, and then to watch as many of them fail.

We all suffer the results of that failure.

I’ve often argued that what today constitutes modern liberalism was created in reaction to Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, published in 2006. Dawkins argued that science has absolutely no explanation for free thought, and that, as such, free thought does not exist. Dawkins asserted that there is no rational difference between believing in free thought and believing in God.

Dawkins wrote that our brains are computers, driven by programming (DNA) and data (lived experiences), and acting in entirely predictable ways based upon those two things. As Dawkins put it, we are “mere meat machines,” that are sufficiently complicated to “think that we think,” but actual free thought and free will are simply not possible under natural science, and thus cannot exist outside of a purely religious context that any rational person should reject.

This denial of agency gave the fractured left something it had previously lacked: an intellectual rationale to unify its disparate movements. The Marxist could now say, “The worker has no responsibility. Class position determines behavior.” The Malthusian could say, “Reproduction cannot be restrained. Biology compels it.” The Alinskyite could say, “Truth is irrelevant. People cannot be persuaded, only conditioned.” And the environmentalist could say, “Humanity is inherently destructive, being programmed to consume.”

Before Dawkins, these ideas sat uneasily alongside one another, contradicting as often as they overlapped. With Dawkins, the contradictions dissolved. By declaring that free will is an illusion, he provided a common foundation on which each faction could claim scientific authority for its rejection of human responsibility. It was Dawkins’ denial of agency that split modern liberalism fully off from classical liberalism, whether he intended that or not.

Liberty requires agency. The denial of agency is a license for control.

Let’s back up a little further and ask ourselves how our different modern political movements answer the following:

1. What should society look like? 
2. What powers should government have? 
3. How should government be structured? 
4. Who should control government? 

Politically, we tend to focus on questions 2 to 4, but really, question 1 is the critical one: what do we want society to look like?

Classical liberals have an easy time with this question, as they would deny that anyone has a right to decide what society should look like for anyone else. Society is, to the classical liberal, not a single thing, but the conglomeration of everyone who happens to be in society. Each person has a right to decide for him- or herself how he or she will interact with the rest of society, making what society looks like a collective decision we all make as a function of living our lives. To the classical liberal, what society looks like is derived rather than determined.

Modern liberals necessarily reject this view. Marxists, Malthusians, Alinskyites, and environmentalists all presuppose the right to define what society should look like, and then to mold society into that vision. These groups exist, in fact, out of the presumption that society, left to its own devices, does not look the way they want it to, and is thus broken.

If we deny agency, then Elon Musk has not done anything personally to justify his wealth. He’s just a meat machine reacting to DNA and lived experience. I could take anyone else, and if they have the same DNA and the same experiences, they will do exactly what Elon Musk has done. Similarly, without agency, I have no reason to blame a criminal for the crimes he or she commits. The person may be preordained via DNA to commit crimes, driven by lived experiences to do so, or driven by a combination of those things, but, in this view, the criminal has no more control over his or her behavior than a stone has over falling if I drop it.

What Dawkins gave was the justification for society to be managed. 

The denial of agency also explains the bizarre cultural paradoxes of the modern left. “Queers for Palestine” sees Palestinians as oppressed, which excuses them from all responsibility even when they want to kill gay people. With agency denied, the oppressed can never be guilty, no matter what they believe or what they do. They are, simply, reacting to their oppression, and there is something wrong with us for allowing them to remain oppressed. To the modern liberal, the Palestinians would not want to kill gay people if the Palestinians were not oppressed. Terrorism is not their fault—it is our fault for holding the terrorists down.

If Dawkins is correct that we are meat machines, then it is possible to control humanity by controlling our inputs, including our lived experiences. The purpose of the media, and everything else the public can see, hear, or experience, ceases to be about truth. Without agency the only purpose for information is to fill our heads with whatever data will optimize our behavior. The purpose of the media, in this environment, is not to inform the public, but to program it. The question of truth isn’t even relevant.

The elite don’t see themselves as meat machines though. Logically, they have to view themselves along those lines, but there is a difference between believing something on a logical basis, and emotionally connecting with that belief. As Jordan Peterson says, people act out their true beliefs, and the elite behave as if they believe in their own agency. It is the rest of us they seek to control.

As the Encyclopedia Britannica says, liberalism in the last century began to move away from negative rights and toward positive rights, removing obstacles such as poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance. Modern liberalism is the logical progression of this view: the belief that the government exists to provide freedom from want, for a public that lacks agency. 

For most of American history, both parties have been dominated by classical liberals who differed on whether they were more afraid of government controlling our culture and morality, or of controlling our economic freedom, but who still broadly believed in limited government and free markets—just at different levels of balance. The difference now is that the Democratic Party is increasingly controlled by those on the left who have expressly rejected classical liberalism, leaving people like Bill Maher, Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and others without a political home.

To the modern liberal, people are for the most part interchangeable. The differences between people can best be understood by looking at the systems of privilege and oppression within which they live. Society can be optimized by reducing the differences between people, and the world can be optimized by reducing the differences between different societies.

Interestingly, this has created a mirror image within conservative circles, with some conservatives also breaking away from classical liberalism, wanting to use the powers of government to restore the morality and culture modern liberalism seeks to destroy. These conservatives call their movement “post-liberalism.” Post-liberals view individualism as the cause of multi-culturalism, and seek collective control over the institutions of power in order to enforce a post-Enlightenment Western culture.

Let’s move on to the second question: what powers should government have?

This, too, is a very easy question for a classical liberal to answer: it should only have as much power as the government needs to protect the liberty of the people.

For both the modern liberal and the post-liberal—both of whom want to define what society should look like—limiting government to the powers necessary to protect liberty is grossly insufficient. It is, in fact, the liberty of the people that these groups believe gave us the broken society we currently have.

You hear this in their language. Post-liberal Patrick Deneen wrote in his book, Why Liberalism Failed, “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.” Bernie Sanders said on the floor of the Senate that “The economy is rigged, our campaign finance system is corrupt and we are struggling to control climate change.” 

The Democratic Socialists of America says on its website that “Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, on an episode of The Tight Rope, “our politics are so broken right now is because our relationships to one another as a society are really deeply broken,” and, in Against the Dead Consensus, a 2019 post-liberal manifesto, Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, and others wrote, “The fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest.”

I don’t think many people will read something with language like, “the fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded,” but Vice President J. D. Vance takes Patrick Deneen seriously.

I would argue that modern liberalism’s focus on multi-culturalism and moral relativism are the reasons our society has become morally and culturally fractured, and that the fastest way back to a unified nation is to return to classical liberalism. I would argue, in fact, that the classical liberal belief that each person should be free to live their lives however they wish, provided they allow everyone else to do the same, carries an inherent moral compass within it: one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins.

You can pack a lot of morality into that one little rule. Sins that don’t harm others can be left for God to judge. Maybe you should not engage in them, but the agents of the Inquisition breaking through your door to stop you is even less preferable.

Where classical liberals see each individual as a moral agent with inherent rights and responsibilities, both the post-liberal and the modern liberal see the individual as something for society to control, and once people are no longer seen as moral agents with inherent worth, they become either resources to be optimized or problems to be solved. Groups like the World Economic Forum and the Club of Rome make this explicit.

The Club of Rome and World Economic Forum call for all human activity to be globally managed, warning that population growth will otherwise destroy the Earth. Their “degrowth” rhetoric treats human life as a plague. By portraying mankind as a cancer on the Earth, these groups deny that human life has intrinsic value and call to have the population reduced, rationed, and restricted.

The logical endpoint is not just managed citizens, but fewer citizens. Once agency is denied, people lose dignity and can be rationed like electricity, or eliminated like pests. This is already happening in public policy.

When people are viewed as machines, the question is no longer how to cultivate their potential, but how to program, limit, or decommission them. That is the essence of anti-humanism: a philosophy that strips man of his soul, his individuality, his hope, and his value, and then calls the erasure progress.

For most of American history, conservatives have been classical liberals almost by definition, based upon a strong belief in limited government, but, with much of the political right drifting into post-liberalism, this is no longer true. A growing number of people who consider themselves “conservatives” today want the government to have as much power as the modern liberal does, but they want that power used to enforce conservative social norms.

The post-liberal right and the modern liberal left are moral opposites. They cannot peacefully coexist. What they agree on is that classical liberalism is a misguided failure. And of course they believe that: if your goal is to manage society from the top down, then the concepts of personal liberty and limited government are absurd.

How about our third question: how should government be structured?

This question is much more easily answered by the modern liberal or the post-liberal. 

The Democratic Socialists of America calls for the Senate to be abolished, and for the president and Supreme Court to be chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Congress would consist solely of the House of Representatives, and would become a parliament. Parliament then would have whatever power parliament wants, over both the states and the people. 

Not all modern liberals are democratic socialists, and theirs is an extreme view, but it is also where all the energy on the political left is, so we should view this as the direction the modern liberal is heading.

Post-liberals want the government to have a similar amount of power, but want it structured within our current Constitutional framework. Post-liberals are fine with how the government is currently structured, but want to remove the limits the Constitution places on it.

Classical liberals spent a great deal of time trying to decide how the government should be structured when they designed our country. They diffused power as widely as possible under the assumption that it can be, and generally will be, abused. They defined a bicameral congress, and separated powers between the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches. They created a Constitution that defines the scope of power each branch has, and they gave the Federal Government only the powers that could not be handled by the individual states, leaving the vast majority of power to the states, or to the people as individuals.

To the modern liberal, abuse of power isn’t really a problem. The people are assumed to be able to remove bad actors through voting, and modern liberals assume this is the only check state power needs. What worries the modern liberal is not abuse of power by government, but abuse of power outside the government, which it believes necessarily happens when some people become wealthier than others. This is why the modern liberal hates billionaires.

Post-liberals don’t worry about abuse of power either, believing that a shared moral and cultural framework would mitigate such things. If someone does something wrong, a just society would demand justice, and, if everybody is the same—white, Christian (preferably Catholic), and post-liberal—that sameness will supposedly breed sin and abuse out of the political gene pool.

This brings us to our final question: who should control government?

The classical liberal answer is the people, through representatives exercising the limited powers the people have authorized. This is done not only to avoid the abuse of power, but also to avoid the concentration of power.

Modern liberals and post-liberals face a contradiction: they claim to govern on behalf of the people, but neither accepts the society the people have created. Both want government to reshape society, which means overriding the choices of the people from whom they claim their authority comes.

A movement that supports democracy only when the public makes the desired choice necessarily places its agenda above the consent of the governed. It must either accept that people are free to reject its vision, or it must seek enough control over society to prevent rejection. To the degree that a movement rejects the agency of the people it governs, control becomes an easy choice.

The Democratic Party has not had a real primary since 2008, when Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton. That’s not surprising—Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion was published two years earlier and it took time for the full implications of his denial of free thought to manifest itself in politics. By 2016, the party leadership decided the candidate, declaring so openly in court. This raises a question: do we use elections to decide who will run our government, or to provide an air of legitimacy to those who run our government?

Neither political party trusts the other with elections. Most Republicans don’t believe Joe Biden really got 81 million votes in 2020, and most Democrats believe Donald Trump was illegitimate in both 2016 and 2024. 

According to a September 2026 Center for Strategic Politics-Liberal Currents poll, 59% of Democrats would support a military coup against Donald Trump today. That’s not exactly an endorsement of democratic principles.

Of course, the whole concept of self-government comes from classical liberalism, so, as our political parties move away from classical liberalism, we should expect them to move away from democratic means as well. 

Preserving our republic requires more than putting the right people in office. It requires limits that bind those people once they get there, and a public willing to defend those limits even when they obstruct some of our personal political goals. We can disagree about what society should look like while recognizing one another’s right to help shape it. We can promote our beliefs, build institutions around them, and persuade others to join us. What we cannot claim is unlimited political authority to make everyone else conform.

Classical liberalism asks us to accept responsibility for our own choices and to respect the freedom of others to make theirs. Its restraints protect us when our opponents govern, but they must also restrain us when we are in charge. Whether you accept that obligation matters more than whether you call yourself a Democrat or a Republican.

I don’t know that Trump is a classical liberal. I would guess he has not given that question much thought. I do know that, like Washington in 1797, Trump is going to step aside in a couple of years, and someone else will be president. For Washington that was a choice. Now it is the law.

I also know that our nation is at a crossroads, with both modern liberalism and post-liberalism rejecting the classical liberalism upon which our nation was founded. Classical liberalism is under threat in both political parties, but if those of us who still believe in the power of the individual can band together and vote as a bloc, then we can have a rebirth of freedom, and, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In late August of 1919, a 30-year-old Adolf Hitler gave his first professional political speech. He was a paid propagandist for the Bavarian Democratic Socialist Government, after the fall of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Though technically he was still in the Bavarian Army, Hitler’s first speech blamed both Jewish finance capitalism and “Jewish Bolshevism,” as two instruments of the same enemy, for the loss of World War I.

According to Hitler, “global Jewry” conspired to create a capitalist state that would push Germany into communism, where it would then be controlled by “global Jewry.” The solution was the eradication of both capitalism and communism, through Democratic Socialism.

Shortly thereafter, on September 12, 1919, Hitler was ordered to attend meetings of the fledgling Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), or the German Workers’ Party. By the end of the month, he was a member.

The DAP was not a Fascist party. Fascism did not yet exist. The party renamed itself, however, in February 1920 to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which remained the official name until the end of World War II.

The word “Nazi” was a Bavarian/Austrian nickname used to describe a bumpkin, or foolish person. The Nazis did not call themselves that, others outside the movement did, and the name stuck overseas. What their party believed was somewhat fluid at first, rejecting both capitalism and communism while looking for a nationalist version of something else.

Hitler was drawn in primarily by the group’s rampant anti-Semitism. 

Germany was unique in that, having only formed as a united country in 1871, its concept of “nation” revolved around Volk (“people”) which was ethnic rather than geographic. Hitler’s title of Führer is often translated as “Leader of Germany,” but it translates better to “living embodiment of the will of the Germanic people.”

When Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, he looked at the chaos unfolding in the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks had seized control of production in the name of equality, but what followed was catastrophic: the Russian economy collapsed and agricultural output plummeted. By 1921, grain production was less than half of what it had been in 1913, and the state responded with repression.

Lenin’s War Communism led to mass starvation, and Stalin’s collectivization would later kill millions. Mussolini recognized that communism focused exclusively on the redistribution of goods, operating under the false assumption that production would remain stable even after incentives were removed. He saw that destroying the profit motive caused productivity to collapse, and that where free people had once tilled the land for reward, now terrified peasants labored under compulsion.

Like Hitler, Mussolini blamed capitalism for the economic volatility of the post-war years. Italy was suffering from high inflation, mass unemployment, and labor unrest, but as with Hitler, when Mussolini looked at Soviet communism he saw an even greater disaster. 

Fascism was Mussolini’s answer: a hybrid that preserved the productive engine of capitalism while placing it under total state control. It was, at its core, a reaction to socialism’s failure to account for human nature, particularly the human need for incentive.

Gabriele D’Annunzio established a self-declared proto-fascist microstate in Fiume on September 12, 1919 (while Hitler was just starting to give political speeches), and argued that true ownership did not depend on legal title, but on the power to control. A state, in his view, could seize operational control of industry while leaving formal ownership in private hands, so long as those owners obeyed the state.

This concept was further developed by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, the primary intellectual architect of Italian fascism, who took D’Annunzio’s ideas and turned them into a full philosophical system. Both men believed that society did not need liberty so much as it needed unity, and that unity could be embodied in a charismatic leader who merged the will of the state with the soul of the people. This leader would have authority over every sphere of life: government, economy, education, culture, and even thought.

Mussolini embraced that vision and put it into practice. In 1922, while Adolf Hitler remained an obscure agitator in Germany, Mussolini led the March on Rome, formed a government, and began transforming Italy into a fascist state. His regime implemented syndicalist economic policies that brought both labor unions and private industry under state control. All economic activity was directed by the state, with the stated goal of harmonizing the interests of labor and capital under a single national purpose.

Hitler noticed Mussolini’s takeover of Italy, and by 1923 Hitler was openly embracing fascism.

Like communism, fascism is an economic system with a political structure on top of it, and when we talk about fascism, we have been conditioned to ignore it as an economic system. That’s a mistake.

Fascism promised to preserve productivity by using state-guided incentives while avoiding the class conflict and economic inefficiencies that plagued socialism. In Mussolini’s view, it was not a betrayal of socialist ideals, but their evolution. He saw it as a socialism that actually worked, or, socialism with boots. To him, fascism was not a repudiation of socialism but its correction; a new version that solved the practical failures of Marxist theory without abandoning its goals. In that light, fascism was Socialism 2.0.

Mussolini’s experiment drew admiration from many global leaders, at least until World War II made open praise politically untenable. Among those impressed was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Members of his administration, including Breckinridge Long, openly admired Mussolini’s corporatist system, while others, like Hugh Johnson and Raymond Moley, studied Italy’s economy closely and incorporated its principles into Roosevelt’s domestic agenda.

Johnson, who directed the National Recovery Administration, publicly praised Mussolini’s “corporate state” and adapted many of its features into the New Deal. The National Industrial Recovery Act for example, suspended antitrust laws and imposed centralized industrial codes across major sectors of the economy. 

Of course, fascism would have been blatantly unconstitutional in the United States, and Roosevelt knew it. That is why he attempted to pack the Supreme Court, proposing to expand it from 9 justices to 15. Had he succeeded, the new justices along with sympathetic members already on the bench would likely have upheld broad fascist-style powers as constitutional. Fortunately, his plan failed and Roosevelt never gained the unchecked control he sought. But the intent was clear: Roosevelt embraced the economic framework of fascism and actively worked to install it in America.

To be fair, Roosevelt probably thought of himself as a benevolent fascist, just as Francisco Franco did in Spain, and as many other authoritarian leaders across Europe and South America believed themselves to be throughout the 1930s and early 1940s (and into the 1970s in Franco’s case). Roosevelt would also likely point out that he was not trying to implement the political system of fascism—just its economic system.

According to the first of Winston Churchill’s six-volume memoir of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm, Joseph Kennedy, the father of John and Bobby Kennedy, our ambassador to England early in the war, had to be recalled as it was the only way to stop him from sending copies of correspondence between F. D. R. and Churchill to Germany.

Nor was an interest in fascism strictly relegated to the left. The German American Bund was on the American right and openly supported Hitler. It also attempted to adapt National Socialism to an American setting.

Figures associated with the broader America First movement, most famously Charles Lindbergh, admired aspects of Nazi Germany and opposed American intervention against it. The America First Committee officially excluded Nazis and Fascists, however, and its program was primarily isolationist rather than an attempt to reproduce Hitler’s economic system. Nor was it cleanly on the American Right, although its more prominent members tended to come from the political right.

Then we have Edsel Ford, who never joined a party but generally supported Republican candidates. According to Max Wallace in The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich, Edsel Ford flew to New York City and celebrated the fall of France at the Waldorf-Austoria with actual Nazi officials from Germany, toasting perceived trans-Atlantic prosperity in a Hitler-dominated Europe.

Edsel profited a great deal from the war, running Detroit’s Willow Run facility that cranked-out a B-24 Liberator Bomber every 63 minutes, while also owning munitions factories across France, all of which were vital parts of the German war machine.

While the Bund embraced both political and economic fascism, and with a Nazi edge, right-wing fascists tended to focus more on the political aspects of fascism, whereas left-wing fascists tended to focus on the economic aspects.

In practical terms, fascism even worked, at least in the short term, which is why so many nations adopted it. By allowing private ownership and tolerating profit within limits, fascist systems created incentives for business owners to improve operations. This stood in contrast to the stagnation of full socialist central planning. 

Under fascism, the state could direct the overall economy, but private owners retained the ability to respond to market demand so long as they followed state objectives. This hybrid model addressed many of the failures that Friedrich Hayek identified in The Road to Serfdom, particularly the collapse of production incentives under centralized control. In Italy, Germany, and Spain, fascism brought their economies out of depression. That kind of turnaround was precisely what Roosevelt hoped to achieve through his own centralized programs during the New Deal.

Fascism, however, contains two fatal flaws. The first is that the system depends entirely on the character of the dictator. If the leader is good, the system might function. Power, however, corrupts, and even the best-intentioned rulers often fall prey to the temptations of control. Good dictators are the exception, and bad ones the rule.

The second problem with fascism is moral. It reduces individual people to being no more important than farm animals, and in that sense, fascism is no better than socialism. Both deny the unique worth of the individual, and both prioritize the collective over personal liberty. Fascism, then, is not socialism’s opposite, but a new and improved version of socialism—Socialism 2.0.

If we look at the United States today, particularly at the federal bureaucracy that Trump has tried to rein in, we see something that resembles a technocratic state operating on autopilot. Elections still happen, but the people in charge are not the ones we elect. Late in Joe Biden’s first term, when he was vacationing in Delaware and Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail, reporters began asking who was actually running the country. The White House assured the public that “a team far more effective than either Biden or Harris could be” was handling things.

Giovanni Gentile had a name for that: fascism.

Once Trump came into office, we found out that if the President steps out of line with the technocratic order, the technocrats rebel. The media, as a part of that technocratic system, fuels the fire to bring modern versions of the Brownshirts (ANTIFA and BLM) into the streets.

Our government now exerts the kind of economic control that early fascist theorists could only imagine. To the extent that political power is directed by an entrenched economic elite, it is increasingly evident that an unelected oligarchy has embedded itself within the state. This oligarchy may well wield the influence that defines modern American fascism.

What is clear is this: our government already has far too much control over the economy, the media is overtly biased in favor of centralized power, and there is no longer any real distinction between journalism and propaganda. A sizable portion of the public even wants more state control, not less—and now suddenly this is true on the post-liberal right as well, with figures like J. D. Vance calling to use, rather than dismantle, the bureaucratic state.

We now have both a fascist left as well as a fascist right.

Fascism is alive and well. It is the dominant economic and political model throughout Western Europe and North America. It does not wear jackboots or armbands anymore, but it thrives in the coordination between government and corporate power. Today’s fascist leaders studied Mussolini and Hitler and figured out that appearances matter. They abandoned overt nationalism, wrapped themselves in the language of globalism, and cloaked authoritarianism in the aesthetics of democracy. Elections still occur, but they change little. Real power remains untouched.

The modern America First movement around Nick Fuentes explicitly rejects free-market orthodoxy in favor of economic nationalism, arguing that the interests of the nation should take precedence over shareholders and the capitalist class. He has called for tariffs, industrial subsidies, large public-works programs, and direct state intervention to rebuild American manufacturing. In that respect, his America First movement embraces both the political instincts associated with fascism, as well as its underlying economic logic: private enterprise may continue, but it must ultimately serve purposes defined by the state.

Nick Fuentes may be the most Nazi-like character of all. He encourages his followers to all but worship him, and he even said, “Hitler was cool.”

Institutions like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street control enormous portions of the global economy. Through ESG mandates and backroom lobbying, they exert substantial influence over public policy. They do not hold office, but they decide who gets financing, who retains board seats, and which ideas are elevated or silenced. This alliance between capital and state is not free-market capitalism: it is economic fascism.

We see it in Canada, where financial institutions were weaponized to punish political dissent during the trucker protests, and where people are arrested for speech violations today. Canadians can’t even share unapproved news sources on social media. The links are blocked. 

We see it in Europe, where speech codes are aggressively enforced, and where unelected bureaucrats in Brussels routinely override elected parliaments.

We also see it in China, which has created an interesting hybrid of communism and fascism in which most of the large corporations are fully owned subsidiaries of the communist party, effectively owned by the state.

And over the past ten or so odd years, we have even seen a resurgence of anti-Semitism as well, increasingly in both parties. It has absolutely exploded since October 7, 2023.

I do not believe our future is Socialism 2.0. I believe we are being pushed into fascism operating on a regional, and eventually on a global, level. And if the alternative is national fascism under J. D. Vance, that’s hardly a better choice.

If we do not regain our focus on classical liberalism, we will be reduced to economic units to be herded and managed, just like livestock, and that may be true regardless of which “side” wins.

October 7 did not happen in a vacuum.

The modern political world uses that phrase to excuse terror. They use it to suggest that geopolitical grievances somehow justify absolute barbarism. But when you look at the forensic reality of history, that phrase is true for an entirely different, terrifying reason. October 7 did not happen in a vacuum because it is the latest execution of a 2,000-year recursive loop of systemic Arab hatred. It is a pathological reenactment of a civilizational system wipe executed by a usurper against the Hebrew people.

To understand the absolute, raw fury of this systemic hatred, we must strip away the myth that Arab hatred of Jews is a modern reaction to Zionism. We must look into the historical record. The blood spilled on October 7 was not new blood. It was the exact same script written in stone two millennia ago during the destruction of Jerusalem.

In the year 70 C.E., the Roman Empire laid siege to the holy city. But Rome did not act alone. While the legions of Vespasian and Titus provided the siege engines and the military discipline, the local Arab tribes provided the raw, undisciplined kinetic energy required for total erasure.

The Roman historian Tacitus diagnosed this pathology 2,000 years ago. He wrote:

Then there were strong levies of Arabs, who felt for the Jews the hatred common between neighbors… This then was the army with which Titus entered enemy territory.

Tacitus, Histories, Book V, Kenneth Welsley translation, 1989.

The Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, a forensic witness to the destruction, documents the massive military force provided by these local Arab rulers to reinforce the Roman siege. Josephus recorded:

There were also a considerable number of auxiliaries got together, that came from the Kings Antiochus and Agrippa, and Sohemus, each of them contributing one thousand footmen that were archers, and a thousand horsemen.

Josephus, De bello iudaeorum, Book III, William Whiston translation, 1737.

This was not a standard military engagement. It was an extermination protocol. The specific, visceral savagery of these Arab auxiliaries forms the foundational code of the usurper’s hatred. It is a savagery that breaks the bounds of military objective and descends into sheer, gleeful butchery.

Listen to the exact words of Josephus as he describes the fate of the terrified, starving Jewish refugees who managed to flee the burning city. He wrote:

…[T]here was found among the Syrian deserters a certain person who was caught gathering pieces of gold out of the excrements of the Jews bellies. For the deserters used to swallow such pieces of gold, as we told you before, when they came out: and for these did the seditious search them all. For there was a great quantity of gold in the city. Insomuch, that as much was now sold [in the Roman camp] for twelve attick [drams], as was sold before for twenty five. But when this contrivance was discovered in one instance, the fame of it filled their several camps, that the deserters came to them full of gold.

Book V.

At the rumor of gold, two thousand living human beings were sliced open in the dirt. Josephus continues, bearing the profound, agonizing sorrow of a man watching his people butchered like animals:

So the multitude of the Arabians, with the Syrians, cut up those that came as supplicants, and searched their bellies. Nor does it seem to me, that any misery befel the Jews that was more terrible than this: since in one night’s time about two thousand of these deserters were thus dissected.

Book V.

He continues:

…[B]ut for the rest of the multitude, they sold them together with their wives and children, and every one of them at a very low price, and that because such as were sold were very many, and the buyers very few… The number of those that were sold was ninety-seven thousand.

Book V.

Josephus notes that the Roman commander Titus was furious upon discovering these disembowelments. The undisciplined savagery breached Roman military order. But Titus chose not to execute the auxiliaries due to their sheer numbers and their necessity on the frontline. The Romans needed the hatred of the desert to finish the job.

Now, let us move from the dust of 70 C.E. directly to the morning of October 7, 2023.

What the world witnessed on that morning was not a new political tactic. It was a desperate, pathological reenactment of the siege of Jerusalem. For 19 centuries, the Arab collective memory has been stuck in a recursive loop, trying to repeat the high of that Roman sanctioned bloodletting. On October 7, they believed they had finally graduated from being the mercenaries of history to being the masters. They attempted to perform a total system deletion of the Jewish people without the logistical shield of a global superpower.

And the mechanics of the atrocity were identical. Why do you think they named it “Al Aqsa Flood”? Where is that? Exactly where their ancestors butchered and raped Jews 1,953 years before. The Temple Mount. They named their modern-day butchery after the same butchery they conducted with glee for the first time under Rome. 

Feel the absolute horror of that morning. Imagine the suffocating terror of families locked in their safe rooms, holding the handles of their doors as terrorists poured gasoline outside. They were burned alive in their own homes, choking on thick black smoke as their houses became crematoriums. Hear the screams of Jewish women subjected to systematic, gleeful rape and mutilation. See the decapitations. See the sheer, unadulterated agony of the victims, slaughtered not for military gain, but for the euphoric thrill of Jewish blood.

During the October 7, 2023, attacks, a terrorist used a murdered woman’s phone to reach his family. He shouted to his parents, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” His father responded with praise, saying, “God bless you,” while his mother exclaimed that she wished she could be there.

The physical reality of the violence was exactly the same. The dragging of bleeding, terrified hostages from their beds into the dark, suffocating underground tunnels of Gaza perfectly mirrors the ancient aftermath. 

Titus sent Jewish women and youths to the Egyptian mines. He sent them to the Roman arenas to be slaughtered by wild beasts and gladiators for public entertainment. Hamas dragged them into tunnels to be tortured, starved, and used as human shields for the entertainment of a global audience cheering for their demise.

The only thing that has changed in two millennia is the transference mechanism. When you walked through Rome into the Colosseum, you had to pass under the Titus Victory Arch to enter its gates. The Colosseum was built with Jewish blood—spoils of war. Where Jewish women were raped by bulls and burnt alive. As told by Martial:

Believe that Pasiphae was mated to the Dictaean bull: we have seen it, the old-time myth has been verified. And let not antiquity, Caesar, marvel at itself: whatever Fame sings of, the Arena provides for you.

Liber Spectaculorum, Book V, Walter C. A. Ker translation, 1919.

And in the Midrash: “And they would seat the daughters of Zion upon the stage, and strip them, and commit a sin [rape] upon them in the sight of everyone.”

The Colosseum and the slave markets have been replaced by GoPro cameras, Telegram broadcasts, and social media feeds. But the gleeful sexualization, the rape, and the eroticization of Jewish death remain the exact same operating protocol. The world is still consuming the “Death Click.” They are still watching the slaughter of Jews and calling it entertainment. They are still calling it justice.

The Arab usurper has not changed its code. It has only updated its tools.

October 7 did not happen in a vacuum. It was the first century executing its code using twenty-first-century weapons. The Arab usurper is still trying to disembowel the owner of land of Israel. Only this time, the owner is not a helpless refugee begging for mercy outside the walls of a burning city.

This time, the owner is holding the sword, and our revenge is slow and cold. Rome fell and so will the idea of Palestine.An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. 

“And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you.”

—Genesis 12:3

Why shunning genocide accusers must be our last stand

Everyone reading this already knows the charge is a lie.

We call it a slander, a moral inversion, an outrageous double standard, a malicious smear. But it is worse than that. It is a modern blood libel. And we must start treating it as such.

We do not need another panel parsing the 1948 Convention, another military brief on civilian-to-combatant ratios in dense subterranean warfare, or another semantic breakdown of dolus specialis—specific intent. We know that neither the International Court of Justice nor the International Criminal Court has found Israel guilty of genocide, and that biased NGOs have quietly shifted statutory goalposts to keep the Jewish state within their crosshairs.

We know what we are looking at: an ancient, eliminationist blood libel retrofitted in the vocabulary of international human rights.

If someone revived the medieval libel that Jews ritually slaughter children to drink their blood, we would not produce a white paper on dietary laws. We would recognize the slander as a predicate for violence and treat the accuser as a pariah. Yet confronted with the supreme crime against humanity—an explicit accusation designed to justify our demonization, subjugation, and ultimate destruction—mainstream institutions instinctively respond with what we do best. We bring Socratic rigor, Talmudic precision, and data-driven white papers to an unprincipled assault, effectively treating moral arsonists and gullible followers alike as legitimate debate partners.

That defensive posture created a permission structure. By meeting this demonizing smear with polite counter-arguments rather than immediate social shunning, we allowed it to harden from fringe provocation into elite dogma. Today, “genocide” has quietly hardened into coffee-shop vernacular, academic orthodoxy, and an ambient slur applied to anyone who believes Israel has a right to exist. We see the straight line running from this rhetoric to Jewish students barricaded in libraries and synagogues firebombed in broad daylight.

You cannot coexist with a perpetrator of genocide. You do not share a boardroom, an orchestra pit, or a faculty lounge with monsters committing the supreme atrocity. To cement that label onto the Jewish state and the vast majority of Jews worldwide who support its existence is to mandate our total moral quarantine. In a liberal democracy, stripping a group of its moral legitimacy is not harmless rhetoric; it demands their subjugation by force, guarantees violent resistance, and lays the groundwork for their physical eradication.

The genocide accusation is not a human rights argument; it is a predicate for elimination.

There are no more defensive perimeters left to fall back to. We stand at a stark fork in the road: we either continue down the current path—watching the supreme crime against humanity degraded into an empty slur while painting a permanent target on Jewish backs—or we draw an unyielding line and treat this slander as the blood libel it is. Resisting it must be our last stand.

We arrived at this point because civil society’s moral immune system is broken. For years, our culture trivialized accountability by exhausting its outrage on minor ideological heresies, disarming itself against genuine malice. When shame lost its universal power and devolved into tribal warfare, we forgot a fundamental truth: pluralism is not a suicide pact. A free society requires wide latitude for dissent and fierce political disagreement, but it cannot survive without non-negotiable boundaries against demonizing, eliminationist hate.

The genocide libel exploits that vacuum by operating as a rhetorical Trojan horse. To the undiscerning eye, it mimics high-minded humanitarianism. But once rolled past the gates of civil discourse and accepted as legitimate debate, the belly opens, unleashing a payload engineered to dehumanize a community and license their destruction.

Because it arrives in this disguise, millions echoing the charge are genuinely, profoundly ignorant. The typical student or activist parrots the word because their peers, professors, and cultural icons compel them to. They cannot define the statutory elements of the crime, nor do they understand military intent; they simply see devastation on a screen and repeat the slogan of the day.

To halt this advance and restore the taboo, we must execute an unyielding pincer movement—combining a bottom-up educational off-ramp for naive peers with a top-down quarantine of the cultural elites who launder the lie.

The bottom-up approach requires everyday citizens to draw firm boundaries in their daily lives, while extending grace to the uninformed. When an acquaintance, peer, or student parrots the charge, our initial response should not be immediate “cancellation,” but direct, uncompromising confrontation: defining the legal reality of warfare and exposing the lethal pedigree of this blood libel. If they recognize the gravity of the word and abandon it, the offense was born of ignorance. The matter ends there.

If they double down after being informed, ignorance is no longer an excuse. The pass expires, and social shunning must begin: personal estrangement, professional friction, and exclusion from polite company. The door to repair remains open, but the cost of re-entry escalates. It requires an explicit acknowledgment of the harm done, a formal renunciation of the libel, and a visible break from the movement that weaponized it.

From the top down, cultural and institutional leaders receive no grace.

Academics, university presidents, editors, politicians, and celebrity artists operate on entirely different terms than ordinary citizens. They are societal force multipliers whose platforms turn words into policy, dogma, and ambient culture. Whether they possess the literacy to know better or simply wield massive amplification without regard for the consequences, they cannot claim the luxury of naive ignorance. When figures with institutional and cultural power deploy the genocide charge, they build the overarching permission structure that normalizes hate for millions. They do so with abandon because, right now, hate pays. It buys algorithmic validation and cheap applause while costing them nothing.

To break that incentive, we have to stop playing defense and go on the offense. We have to make this hate costly again.

Trafficking in a blood libel must carry the exact same professional toxicity that the entertainment industry already applies to overt racism. When Robert Kraft removed Macklemore from a stadium lineup, it required no corporate hand-wringing. It required only a single, unyielding standard: “You traffic in a blood libel that endangers human beings, and I will not allow my stage to launder it into the mainstream.”

Anyone who books, produces, funds, or platforms figures who deploy this libel must understand that they are absorbing that moral and commercial liability. For elites, redemption cannot come through a PR-crafted statement of regret; it demands a full mea culpa, public retractions, an accounting of the damage inflicted, and active labor to dismantle the lie they popularized.

Ultimately, this cannot be a fight waged by Jews alone. Civil society as a whole faces a stark choice. We can continue down the path of tribal sorting, where bad actors weaponize moral language to destroy the innocent without consequence. Or we can do the hard work of restoring our universal moral taboos against eliminationist hate, applied without fear or partisan favor.

The genocide accusation against the Jewish state offers our culture a rare, decisive opportunity to begin that restoration. Unlike ambiguous dog whistles or subjective microaggressions, this is an explicit, definable, one-word slander. It is factually, legally, and historically a lie. And it is uttered on the record.

Because the line is so stark, society can finally bring its full moral weight to bear. By refusing to debate this blood libel and demanding immediate, uncompromising social and professional costs for those who deploy it, we can make the charge unaffordable again. If we succeed, we will not only protect the Jewish community from real-world violence; we will begin to restore the foundational moral guardrails of liberal democracy itself.

“Truth scarce ever yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first appearance.”
—John Locke

The notification on your screen does not arrive as an invitation to think. It arrives as a demand to feel.

A ten-second video appears. A crowd surges. A body falls. A scream cuts through the background noise. Above it, a caption tells you exactly what you are witnessing. It names a villain, identifies a victim, and assigns a motive.

Before the video has finished playing, you already know what you are supposed to believe.

So you react. You share it, condemn it, and join thousands of other people expressing the same certainty.

Instant judgment feels exactly like justice.

But what if the video was taken years earlier? What if the audio came from another event? What if the person identified as the perpetrator was actually a bystander trying to help?

By the time the evidence catches up, the verdict has already been delivered.

This is usually described as a problem of misinformation. I think it is something deeper: we are losing the ability to live with uncertainty long enough to discover what is true.

That may sound like a small distinction. It is not.

A free society depends upon people who can make judgments, but it also depends upon people who understand that judgment is not the same as certainty, that conviction is not the same as knowledge, and that being morally serious does not require pretending to know what we do not yet know.

The most important sentence in a democratic society may be one that has become increasingly difficult to say: “I don’t know yet.”

Liberal democracy rests upon a proposition that is both demanding and fragile: human beings are capable of reason.

Not infallible reason, but reason capable of correction.

We can examine evidence, question authority, challenge inherited beliefs, and change our minds. That last capacity may be the most important of all.

“Prejudice is the reason of fools.”
—Voltaire

The Enlightenment did not give us a perfect world. It was not a single doctrine or unified movement; its thinkers disagreed profoundly, and the societies shaped by their ideas often failed catastrophically to live up to their own principles. But despite those disagreements, many Enlightenment thinkers shared a powerful commitment to reason, inquiry, criticism of inherited authority, and the possibility that human beings could improve their understanding through examination and debate.

The Enlightenment helped strengthen an intellectual tradition in which human beings were increasingly understood as capable of subjecting authority, custom, and even their own assumptions to reason.

Truth does not become true because authority declares it, tradition endorses it, or a majority believes it. The willingness to question what we have been told, to test inherited assumptions against reason and evidence, is one of the great disciplines of a free society.

Evidence could challenge authority. Reason could challenge tradition. Individuals possessed rights that did not depend entirely upon the permission of the state or the approval of the majority.

And beneath all of this was a difficult recognition: human beings are often wrong.

That possibility is not a footnote to liberalism. It is one of its foundations.

A person who knows he can be wrong has a reason to listen. A journalist who knows she can be wrong has a reason to verify. A teacher who knows he can be wrong has a reason to distinguish instruction from indoctrination. A citizen who knows she can be wrong has a reason to examine evidence before surrendering her judgment to a political tribe.

The Enlightenment was not simply an inheritance of rights. It was also an inheritance of intellectual humility.

And that may be precisely what we are losing.

The modern information environment has created a peculiar problem. We have more information than any generation before us, but access to information is not the same thing as access to knowledge.

A photograph is not self-interpreting. A video is not its own context. A headline is not an investigation. A viral claim does not become evidence because millions of people have repeated it. An allegation does not become a fact because it confirms what we already suspected.

Yet the speed of digital communication has created enormous pressure to decide immediately.

Something happens. Within seconds, we are expected to know what happened. Within minutes, we are expected to know who is responsible. Soon afterward, we are expected to know what it means. Then we are expected to announce our position.

The pressure is not merely informational. It is social.

To hesitate can look like indifference. To ask for evidence can look like evasion. To say, “I don’t know yet” can look like cowardice. To refuse to condemn before the facts are established can make people suspect that you secretly support the wrong side.

This is where something fundamental has changed.

We are no longer simply exchanging information. We are performing identity.

A judgment has become a declaration of belonging. We do not merely say what we think happened; we demonstrate which people we stand with, which people we distrust, and which moral community we believe ourselves to inhabit.

The verdict therefore does something the evidence cannot do: it tells everyone else who we are.

And once a conclusion becomes part of our identity, evidence becomes threatening. 

Evidence that confirms us feels reassuring; evidence that challenges us feels personal.

The question quietly changes from “What is true?” to “How can I defend what people like me believe?” That is a much more dangerous question.

We need to recover a distinction that democratic societies desperately need: conviction is not certainty.

A person can believe deeply in freedom of speech while admitting that the facts of a particular controversy are unclear. A person can believe in equality before the law while changing his mind about whether a particular policy advances it. A person can believe in human dignity while investigating competing claims about what happened to particular people. 

Principles tell us what we are committed to protecting.

Evidence tells us what happened.

Those are related, but they are not the same thing.

The problem begins when we use our principles to determine the facts rather than allowing the facts to inform our judgments.

The temptation is universal because the reward is powerful: certainty feels good. It simplifies the world. It tells us who is good and who is bad, whom to trust and whom to fear. Most importantly, it relieves us of the uncomfortable possibility that reality might be more complicated than our politics.

But reality does not owe us simplicity, and evidence does not owe us confirmation.

The answer is not skepticism about everything. That would simply replace one intellectual failure with another.

We do not need citizens who believe nothing. We need citizens whose confidence is proportionate to the evidence. We need citizens who can analyze critically, weigh competing evidence, recognize uncertainty, and revise their conclusions when the facts demand it.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “I believe this,” “I suspect this,” “The evidence currently suggests this,” “The evidence establishes this,” and “We do not know yet.”

These are not interchangeable statements.

A healthy intellectual culture preserves the distinctions between them. An unhealthy one collapses them.

This is why the question “What is the evidence?” matters so much.

Not because evidence answers every question. It does not. Not because every human experience can be reduced to a data point. It cannot.

But evidence imposes a discipline upon belief. It asks us to submit our conclusions to something outside ourselves.

That is extraordinarily important in an age in which each of us can construct an information environment almost perfectly tailored to our existing assumptions.

We can choose which voices to hear, which stories to share, which communities to join, and which evidence to ignore. 

The result is an environment in which confirmation can feel like truth.

Our purpose, if we are serious about liberal democracy, must be different.

It must be understanding.

This is why the recovery of Enlightenment principles matters.

For many Americans, particularly younger Americans, the Enlightenment is little more than a term encountered in a history class: a collection of names, a period on a timeline, a chapter to be studied and forgotten.

That is a loss with consequences.

We have inherited the language of liberty without necessarily inheriting the intellectual habits that make liberty possible.

We talk about rights without always asking what obligations accompany them. We invoke equality without always asking what equality before the law requires. We defend freedom of speech without always understanding why the freedom to hear ideas we dislike is inseparable from the freedom to express ideas we cherish. We demand education while sometimes forgetting that education is supposed to cultivate judgment, not simply transmit conclusions.

And we talk about journalism while increasingly confusing reporting with persuasion.

The answer is not perfect neutrality. Perfect neutrality is probably impossible.

The answer is intellectual discipline.

Facts must remain distinguishable from opinions, evidence from assertion, an allegation from an established fact, an observation from an interpretation, a political preference from a principle, and a human being from the category into which we have placed him.

That last distinction matters more than we may realize.

One of the central insights of liberalism is deceptively simple:

The individual matters.

Not the demographic category, not the political tribe, not the ideology, but the individual.

This is more than a philosophical abstraction. It is a defense against collective judgment.

The moment we stop seeing individuals and begin seeing categories, evidence becomes less important. If I have already decided what “those people” are like, I no longer need to know much about the person standing in front of me.

The category has done the thinking for me.

This is one of the ways dehumanization begins.

A neighbor becomes an enemy. A citizen becomes a partisan. A student becomes an activist. A believer becomes a fundamentalist. An immigrant becomes a statistic. A political opponent becomes a caricature.

The individual disappears.

And once the individual disappears, universal principles become much easier to abandon.

Liberalism, at its best, resists that temptation. It does not require us to like everyone, agree with everyone, or admire the people whose rights it protects.

It requires something more difficult: consistency.

The principle has to survive the identity of the person to whom it is being applied.

Free speech is easy when the speaker is someone we admire. Due process is easy when the accused is someone we like. Tolerance is easy when the belief is one we share. Human rights are easy to defend when the victims belong to a group we instinctively understand.

The real test begins when the principle becomes inconvenient.

That is where liberalism becomes difficult, and that is where it becomes meaningful.

Perhaps this is where we have failed young Americans most.

We have given them unprecedented access to information without always giving them the intellectual tools necessary to evaluate it.

We have taught them how to find information. We have not always taught them how to determine whether the information deserves their confidence.

Digital literacy cannot simply mean knowing how to operate a device. It has to mean knowing how information reaches us: who produced it, when it was produced, what evidence supports it, what evidence is missing, whether the original source can be examined, whether the image is authentic, whether the quotation is complete, whether the headline actually describes what the article establishes, and whether we are looking at evidence or someone’s interpretation of evidence.

And perhaps the most important question is this:

What would I need to see to change my mind?

That question should be taught in every classroom.

Education should not produce young people who are incapable of being persuaded. It should produce young people who are difficult to manipulate.

There is a profound difference.

The purpose of education is not to manufacture citizens with the correct conclusions. It is to produce citizens capable of reaching conclusions for themselves.

A liberal democracy cannot survive if every generation simply inherits the conclusions of the generation before it. It survives when each generation inherits the tools to examine those conclusions.

Young Americans should understand natural rights, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and the limits of political power. They should understand the American founders’ arguments about consent and government.

They should also study the failures and contradictions surrounding the Enlightenment and the American experiment: slavery alongside liberty, exclusion alongside equality, and the gap between America’s ideals and its history.

Not because history should produce either worship or shame, but because history should teach judgment.

The Enlightenment is valuable not because the societies shaped by its ideas were perfect, but because its principles gave subsequent generations tools with which to expose the distance between principles and practice.

That is what makes an intellectual inheritance worth preserving. A principle means very little if it applies only when doing so makes us comfortable.

Journalism has a similar responsibility. Its goal should be to report the facts faithfully. Facts do not change according to how a journalist feels about them. 

Report what is known. Distinguish what is known from what is alleged. Make uncertainty visible when uncertainty exists. Correct mistakes. Apply the same evidentiary standards to friends and adversaries. Resist the temptation to turn every event into a morality play in which the facts have already been assigned their roles

Fidelity to reality requires more than evaluating the finished report. It also requires understanding the conditions under which the report was produced.

Consider what happens when information is gathered under the authority of a terrorist organization.

Palestinian journalist and photographer Motaz Azaiza has described a media environment in Gaza in which journalists faced pressure, intimidation, and punishment when their reporting crossed Hamas’s red lines. He describes journalists being instructed about how news should be reported, journalists being detained or threatened, and reporters learning that criticism of Hamas could carry consequences.

The significance is not simply that Hamas wanted favorable coverage. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has exercised political and military control over Gaza, and its interest in controlling the information leaving the territory is hardly incidental to its broader effort to shape the narrative surrounding its rule and its war with Israel.

The deeper problem is what such an environment does to the information available to the outside world.

A journalist does not have to fabricate a story for the resulting picture to be incomplete. If a reporter knows that certain photographs, questions, interviews, or criticisms may bring punishment, some things will never be recorded. Some witnesses will never speak. Some stories will never leave the room.

That is why provenance matters.

We should ask not only what a source tells us, but under what conditions that information was gathered.

A photograph can be authentic and still lack context. A video can be genuine and still tell only part of a story. A journalist can sincerely report what he or she sees while operating under constraints the audience never sees.

Journalism also has a responsibility to make visible the conditions under which it was possible to know what happened. A free press depends not only upon journalists having cameras and notebooks. It depends upon their ability to use them without fear.

And when that freedom is compromised, the absence of information can become information itself.

The journalist’s responsibility is not to eliminate uncertainty.

It is to make uncertainty visible.

The public does not need journalists to pretend they have no perspectives. It needs journalists who understand that their perspectives do not determine what is true.

A journalist can have a worldview. A teacher can have a worldview. A citizen can have a worldview.

But reality does not have to conform to any of them.

When journalism ignores this, reporting becomes advocacy. And when citizens no longer inhabit even a basic shared factual world, democratic disagreement becomes nearly impossible.

Reclaiming Classical Liberalism

By classical liberalism, I mean the tradition centered on individual liberty, freedom of conscience and expression, equality before the law, limits on political power, and the right of individuals to question authority.

Perhaps this is what we have been missing.

We have been trying to repair the machinery of democracy without asking whether we have preserved the intellectual habits that make the machinery worth having.

We need to reclaim classical liberalism, not because the past was perfect, not because the Enlightenment answered every question, and not because Americans should stop disagreeing, but because freedom requires an intellectual foundation, and that foundation must be taught again.

Americans need to be reacquainted with the principles that make liberal democracy possible, not told which political conclusions to reach, but taught how conclusions should be reached.

Reason. Evidence. Individual liberty. Freedom of conscience. Equality before the law. Freedom of expression. The rule of law. Limits on political power. Government by consent. Universal human dignity.

These principles do not tell us what every citizen must believe. They establish the conditions under which citizens can disagree without making democracy impossible.

Liberal democracy does not require political agreement. It requires agreement about the rules and intellectual disciplines within which disagreement takes place.

We should be able to disagree profoundly and still agree that evidence matters.

We should be able to hold opposing political convictions and still agree that individual human beings cannot be reduced to political categories.

We should be able to defend freedom of speech for people whose views we find repugnant and criticize those views without believing that criticism requires censorship.

We should be able to change our minds without experiencing that change as humiliation.

And we should be able to apply our principles when doing so is politically inconvenient. It is the discipline of conviction. The deepest threat to liberal democracy may not be disagreement. It may be the loss of the intellectual habits that make principled disagreement possible.

A free society requires citizens who can tolerate uncertainty long enough to investigate it, who can encounter evidence that challenges their assumptions without immediately rejecting either the evidence or the person presenting it, and who can say, when necessary: “I was wrong.”

These are not signs of weakness. They are signs that the mind remains free.

We have inherited the institutions of liberal democracy without always preserving the habits that sustain them. We have inherited freedom without always learning the discipline required to use it. We have inherited information without always learning how to distinguish knowledge from assertion. And we have inherited political identities powerful enough to make us defend conclusions before we have examined the evidence.

The verdict arrives. Then the evidence. It should be the other way around.

We should teach our children to ask what is true before asking what their side believes. We should teach ourselves to ask what the evidence establishes before deciding what the evidence means.

And when the evidence is incomplete, we should have the courage to say: “I don’t know yet.”

Then we should have the courage to find out. Because before a free society can decide what it believes, it must remember how to think.

What is sin?

My American Heritage Dictionary defines it as follows:

sin (sĭn) n.

1. A transgression of a religious or moral law, esp. when deliberate.
2. Theol. A condition of estrangement from God as a result of breaking God’s law.
3. An offense, violation, fault, or error.

There is a great deal of agreement across religions on what constitutes sin. We all agree that murder is a sin. Adultery and theft are sins, but there are also a great many things on which we do not agree, such as polygamy. 

We also don’t always agree on when or where things are sinful.

Sin, in the Bible, comes from God and is both eternal and unchanging (Malachi 3:6; Psalm 119:89–90, 142, 160). Moses did not create the Judeo-Christian moral order. That morality is woven through Genesis (4:7–11, 18:20, 20:6–9, 39:7–9) and was passed down orally for untold millennia before Moses was even born (Genesis 18:19; Deuteronomy 6:6–9). Moses only wrote it down (Exodus 24:4; Deuteronomy 31:9, 24). 

This article is going to compare and contrast the Abrahamic religions as they pertain to sin. It is not going to focus on the specifics of what acts are or are not sins, but on the nature of sin.

We will ask several questions: Did the moral order exist before it was recorded, or did it emerge over time? Is the moral law eternal, or does it change in the afterlife? Is the religious leader inside the moral order, or outside of it? Does the moral order ever change on the fly? And finally, how many moral orders are there within each religion?

Note that the Laws of Moses included moral law, ceremonial law, and civil law. Judaism and Christianity share the same moral law. Where they differ, other than ceremonial and civil law, is not in the rules of morality, but in the rules of redemption. I had a New Testament professor in college who likened Jewish rules of redemption to using a credit card. When you sin, you take on a debt that must be repaid, and some Jewish ceremonial law covers how those payments are to be made.

With Christians it is more like a debit card in the sense that Christ already paid for our sin. No debt is incurred. What Christians have is a personal relationship with Jesus under which, every time we sin, we increase the suffering Jesus endured on our behalf. Sin, to a Christian, is akin to giving Jesus another lash.

Islam, interestingly, does not deal with redemption at all. Islam simply says that even Muhammad did not know if he would go to Paradise or hell (Sahih al-Bukhari 3929), and that Allah will make that judgment for each person, outside their control (Sahih Muslim 2816a–b).

Let’s start with the first question: Did the moral order exist before it was recorded, or did it emerge over time?

The Bible answers that question very clearly. Cain murdered Abel long before Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments (Genesis 4:8–12). God did not tell Cain that murder would become wrong once Moses wrote down a law against it. The same thing happens with adultery. When Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, there was no written commandment against adultery. Moses would not be born for generations. Joseph still knew it was wrong. He asked her how he could commit such a wicked act and “sin against God” (Genesis 39:7–9). It actually goes back even before Eden. In each step of Creation, God “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).

Islam can claim that a moral order existed before Muhammad, as it borrows from the Bible, but it cannot claim its own moral order existed before Muhammad as Muhammad could not reveal it until after it was revealed to Muhammad.

In Islam, very clearly the moral order emerged over time.

Things get even more interesting when we move to the second question and look at sin in the afterlife.

Christians do not believe sin can exist in Heaven (Revelation 21:27, 22:3). This is partially because the conditions that produce sin, such as material scarcity, won’t exist, but, more than that, Christians believe our desire to sin will be removed from us (1 John 3:2; Hebrews 12:23). Sin does not change—only our desire to commit it does. Christians then spend eternity in personal and collective fellowship with God (Revelation 21:3–4, 22:3–5).

There is also no marriage or sex in Heaven, as procreation is unnecessary (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:34–36).

The afterlife in Islam is very different.

Islamic sources are not entirely clear about the number of women a man receives in Paradise. The Qur’an promises beautiful female companions, or houris, but gives no specific number (44:54, 52:20, 56:22). Authentic ahadith describe men in Paradise with two wives (Sahih Muslim 2834a), while another well-regarded hadith promises Muslim martyrs 72 wives from among the houris (Jami at-Tirmidhi 1663). Other traditions extend the number 72 to all men in Paradise (Tirmidhi 2562; Sunan Ibn Majah 4337), but 72 is sometimes the minimum. One enlightening source, though considered “weak,” says that “An inmate of Paradise will have 500 Hurs, 4,000 unmarried women and 8,000 widowed women.”

Whatever the number, the houris are pleasure creatures. They are created companions of Paradise who never lived earthly lives (Qur’an 56:22, 35–37) and are described in explicitly sexual terms, including as virgins untouched by any man or jinn before their husbands (55:56, 72–74; 56:35–37). More scurrilously, however, despite some Western translations describing them as having “swelling breasts” in 78:33, the Arabic word used to denote their breasts is kawa‘ib, which the tenth-century scholar Ibn Faris says refers to a girl “when her breasts begin to develop.” This means that the houris of Paradise are actually not women, but rather prepubescent children at the very dawn of their sexual development. This comports perfectly with Muhammad’s marriage to his wife A’ishah—described as his “favorite” wife—at the age of six and consummation of the marriage at the age of nine (Sahih al-Bukhari 5134).

Meanwhile, earthly women get to rejoin their husbands if they go to Paradise (Qur’an 43:70). Some traditions say that earthly wives will be superior in beauty to the houris because of their worship of Allah, although the hadith supporting this claim is also considered “weak” (at-Tabarani, al-Mu‘jam al-Kabir, 23/367; al-Bayhaqi, al-Ba‘th wa’l-Nushur, no. 390).

There are also rivers of wine in Paradise, which is odd given that alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and it is a wine that does not provide over-intoxication or hangovers, so one can drink as much of it as one wishes (Qur’an 47:15, 56:18–19). People also get rivers of milk and honey, and every pleasurable thing they may ever wish to eat or drink (Qur’an 47:15, 43:71). There are no bathrooms in Paradise, but there is a need to relieve oneself from time to time, which is done through belching, and through “fragrant perspiration” (Sahih Muslim 2835a, 2835c).

Even the lowest-ranking person in Paradise is told to desire whatever he wants. After he has finished listing his desires, Allah gives him what he desired and an equivalent amount besides (Sahih Muslim 182c). 

Many of the things someone may want to do in Paradise would be sinful if done on Earth, but in Paradise Allah radically changes the concept of sin such that a man can spend eternity drinking and fornicating to his heart’s desire, all while in open fellowship with Allah. It almost appears that the ability to spend eternity doing things that were sinful in life is the whole point of Paradise—and the main motivation for getting there.

Historically, there was some discussion of the question of homosexual relations in Paradise. The Encyclopaedia Iranicanotes that Hanafi jurists considered the possibility that homosexual intercourse might, like wine, be a pleasure forbidden in life but available in Paradise, but they ultimately rejected it. This is presumably less of a problem for the man than for his wives, who presumably spend much of eternity bored.

Some behaviors remain sinful in Paradise, and, as with Christianity, the desire to sin is removed, but the morality in Paradise is still vastly different from the moral system Islam demands on Earth.

With Christianity, God’s moral nature predates Creation and is eternal (Genesis 1:1–4; Malachi 3:6; James 1:17), but in Islam, not only did the moral system diverge from that of the Judeo-Christian world as soon as Muhammad began to reveal it, but it also changed over the course of Muhammad’s life (Qur’an 2:106, 16:101).

Early Muslims could drink alcohol. Qur’an 2:219 said alcohol contained some benefit, but also “great sin,” with the sin outweighing the benefit. Qur’an 4:43 prohibited approaching prayer while intoxicated. Finally, Qur’an 5:90–91 ordered believers to avoid intoxicants altogether, calling them Satan’s handiwork. The nature of alcohol did not change, but the morality surrounding it did.

Finally, Muhammad’s opinion of polytheism changed over time. He speaks of the oneness of God, but then comes the infamous incident of what has become known as the “Satanic Verses.” According to the biographer Ibn Sa’d, Muhammad “was anxious for the welfare of his people [the pagans of Makah], wishing to attract them as far as he could.” Hoping to woo them to Islam, Muhammad claimed that three pagan goddesses named al-Lat, al-Uzzah, and Manat were “the exalted Gharaniq [cranes] whose intercession is approved,” meaning that his fellow Arabs could pray to them and they would fly like birds up to Allah to deliver their prayers. This moved some of the pagans to convert, but Allah, through the Angel Gabriel, disapproved and scolded Muhammad. Still, Allah reassured Muhammad by telling him that it was Satan who had told him to say that new converts could pray to the goddesses, and “God will annul what Satan has suggested.” In other words, Muhammad had demanded monotheism, then endorsed idolatry when it looked like it would gain him converts, got out of the pickle by blaming it all on the devil, and then went back to demanding monotheism. This shameful story has been buried in the Islamic sources for well over a millennium, and is the reason Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa for Salman Rushdie’s murder in 1989: Rushdie’s novel of the same name exposed Muhammad’s humiliating pivot to the world.

This brings us to the next two questions: Is the religious leader inside the moral order, or outside of it? Does the moral order ever change on the fly?

Christ absolutely lived within the same moral order that applied to everyone else. What made Christ unique was not a special set of rules. Christianity claims that Christ was tempted as we are, but never sinned (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22). Christ then became the perfect sacrifice, or “unblemished Lamb,” that was sacrificed for the sins of all mankind (1 Peter 1:18–19; 1 John 2:2). 

It turns out that some of the changes to the moral system were only relevant to Muhammad, and these changes tended to occur on the fly, in ways that were beneficial to the prophet.

Qur’an 4:3 limits ordinary Muslim men to four wives. Muhammad had more than four, and Qur’an 33:50 explicitly creates marriage rules unique to him. Classical Islamic commentary acknowledges this directly: the four-wife restriction did not apply to Muhammad (Tafsir at-Tabari on Qur’an 33:50; Tafsir Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 4:3 and 33:50). Muhammad could marry a believing woman who offered herself to him, if he wanted her (Qur’an 33:50). The Qur’an then says this provision is “exclusively for you, not for the rest of the believers” (Qur’an 33:50). At-Tabari’s commentary likewise says that this was something permitted to Muhammad but not to ordinary Muslim men (Tafsir al-Tabari on Qur’an 33:50).

Then we have moral changes made on the fly that did apply to all men, such as in the case of Zainab.

Zaid was an Arab slave of Muhammad whom he then freed, but, having grown fond of him, Muhammad began to treat him as his adopted son (Qur’an 33:4–5). Zaid then married Zainab, a young cousin of Muhammad. One day, Muhammad came over to Zaid’s house to speak with him, but his adopted son was not home. Zainab was there instead, in a state of relative undress, causing Muhammad to immediately lust for her. Learning of this, a deeply embarrassed Zaid decided to divorce her so that Muhammad could marry her, which he then did (33:37). At the time, the Arabs considered a man marrying a woman who had been married to a male relative of his a form of incest—like the scandal of King Claudius marrying his murdered brother’s widow Queen Gertrude in Hamlet—but Muhammad had gone ahead and done this anyway. Qur’an 33:37, however, does not merely permit the marriage but says Allah gave Zainab to Muhammad in marriage in order to establish that believers could marry the divorced wives of their adopted sons. Traditional Islamic commentary openly describes Muhammad’s marriage as the mechanism through which the previous social prohibition was broken (Tafsir Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 33:37; Tafsir al-Tabari on Qur’an 33:37). But that wasn’t enough for Muhammad. Even though men could now marry the divorced wives of their adopted sons, Muhammad, needing to silence the allegations of incest, then abolished adoption forever (Qur’an 33:4).

A man with multiple wives was also expected to divide his time fairly among them (Qur’an 4:3; Sahih al-Bukhari 5212). Qur’an 33:51, however, gave Muhammad more freedom. He could postpone the turn of whichever wife he wanted, receive whichever wife he wanted, and later bring back a wife he had set aside.

According to Sahih Muslim, Muhammad permitted Muslim men to enter temporary marriages for a fixed period (Sahih Muslim 1405b). This amounts to a form of prostitution in which a man can give a woman something of value or use to her in exchange for “legalized” sex. One report says he permitted it for three days during the campaign of Awtas and then prohibited it (1405f). Sahih Muslim’s chapter heading summarizes the Sunni tradition as: temporary marriage “was permitted then abrogated, then permitted then abrogated,” with the final prohibition lasting until the Day of Resurrection (Sahih Muslim, Book 16, chapter on mut‘ah; Sahih Muslim 1406l). Nevertheless, nikah mu‘tah, or sigheh in Farsi, is still practiced regularly in certain forms amongst both Sunni and Shi‘ah Muslims.

The punishment for illicit sex also changed on the fly. 

Qur’an 4:15 ordered women found guilty of sexual immorality to be confined to their homes until they died, unless God later provided “another way.” Qur’an 4:16 prescribed punishment for the guilty but said to leave them alone if they repented. A later revelation, Qur’an 24:2, prescribed 100 lashes for fornication, while the Hadith tradition established a different punishment for married adulterers. The underlying act remained sinful, but God’s prescribed response to it changed over the course of Muhammad’s life.

This brings us to our final question: how many moral orders does each religion have?

Christianity has just one. The moral order existed before Moses recorded it, which is why Cain could sin (Genesis 4:7–11) and Joseph could call adultery a sin against God centuries before the Law was given (Genesis 39:7–9). Jesus did not receive exemptions from it. Christianity claims that He lived within it perfectly (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22). Nor does the moral order reverse itself in Heaven (Revelation 21:27, 22:3–5).  

With Islam this is harder to count.

There is one moral order for ordinary Muslims, but even that order changed during Muhammad’s lifetime. Things could be permitted, prohibited, and sometimes permitted again, most slickly through the mechanism of abrogation (Qur’an 2:106, 16:101; Sahih Muslim 1405f, 1406l).

There was another set of rules just for Muhammad (Qur’an 33:50–51). Muhammad seemed to be able to carve-out exceptions for himself whenever he liked (Qur’an 33:50–51).

Then there is Paradise, where many sins stop being sinful (Qur’an 47:15; 55:56; 56:18–22, 35–37).

That leaves Islam with at least three distinguishable moral orders: the changing order revealed for Muslims on Earth (Qur’an 2:106, 16:101), the special order that applied to Muhammad (33:50–51), and the order that applies in Paradise (47:15; 55:56; 56:18–22, 35–37).

And that brings us right back to where we started: what is sin?

If sin is doing something Allah has prohibited at a particular time, for a particular person, under a particular set of circumstances, then Allah can prohibit something today and permit it tomorrow. He can prohibit something for you and permit it for Muhammad, or can prohibit something on Earth and permit it in Paradise.

That is a very different conception of sin from the Christian one. Christianity begins with an eternal God whose moral nature does not change. Sin is not wrong because God happens to prohibit it for now. God prohibits it because it is contrary to who God is, and to who God desires for us to be.

The real difference, though, is not about wine, marriage, sex, or any of the other specific examples of specific sins. The real question is whether God’s commands reveal an eternal moral order, or if God’s commands create the moral order only as and when they are given.

The bottom line is this: If God’s nature does not change, neither can the moral order that flows from it.

In 1981, Rod Stewart released a song about a couple named Billy and Patti, two young lovers desperate for change and running away from home with but a dollar between them, trying and make a better life together. Stewart called it “Young Turks,” and when I first heard it on MTV at the age of 10, I was captivated by its rebellious energy.

Interestingly, the song does not tell us how things work out for Billy and Patti. It ends with them finding paradise closed, with Billy writing back to Patti’s parents to try and explain why they ran away together, and then with Patti giving birth to a 10-pound baby boy. We’re left to guess how things worked out for ourselves.

In England, “Young Turk” is a popular phrase for a young person who pushes impatiently for change, and though most British people probably don’t know it, the phrase comes from an actual political movement in Turkey, during the First World War.

In the early twentieth century, the Young Turks promised to modernize the Ottoman Empire. The movement’s Committee of Union and Progress sidelined the sultan as supreme ruler and took dictatorial power in 1913. The movement was technically secularist, but retained and made good use of most Islamic prejudices against non-Muslims while mixing them with the idea of pan-Turkish nationalism. As the war dragged on, and an attempt to conquer Russian-controlled Armenia failed spectacularly, both the government and its exhausted, frozen, humiliated soldiers looked for a scapegoat. In revenge, the Young Turk-dominated government organized the deportation and destruction of the empire’s Armenian Christians. Families were driven from their homes and marched toward the deserts of Syria. Some were massacred; others died of hunger, thirst, disease, and exposure. Many of those who survived the death marches, women and young girls in particular, were raped and enslaved.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that at least 664,000 and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Armenians died in what became known as the Armenian Genocide.

The actual Young Turks were not the Billy and Patti of whom Rod Stewart sang. The actual Young Turks were genocidal monsters.

I don’t blame Rod Stewart for naming a song “Young Turks.” I’m sure he had no clue what that phrase might mean to an Armenian, but what do you say when Cenk Uygur, who is from Turkey, names his media network The Young Turks? 

Of all the names Uygur could have chosen, why did he pick that one? Perhaps it will help if we better understand just who Cenk Uygur is.

Cenk’s father, Doğan Uygur, grew up near Kilis, in southeastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border. Doğan’s father died when Doğan was an infant. His family had debts and farmed olives and grapes by hand. Sometimes a neighbor’s mule would help Doğan and his family, but often they had to carry the heavy containers of olives by hand as well. 

Doğan grew up with no electricity, and his workday began, according to Cenk, at four in the morning. This would have been a hard, grueling life, and I can imagine Doğan looking out across the barren fields, beyond the olive trees in which he toiled, toward the Syrian desert where so many Armenians were killed just 20-odd years before he was born.

Cenk recounts an uncle asking Doğan whether or not he liked working the farm. Doğan did not, but he was a remarkably hard worker, so his uncle thought he had real potential to do something more meaningful with his life. That uncle encouraged Doğan to leave the farm and head to İstanbul. 

Doğan took his uncle’s advice, moved to İstanbul, earned a scholarship, and studied mechanical engineering. Upon graduation, Doğan founded Enternasyonal Makina Sanayi, a successful machine manufacturing company. Somewhere along the way, Doğan married Nuket Yavaşça, and then, in 1970, Cenk was born as the second of two children.

As a child walking with his parents through İstanbul, Cenk claims to have seen a small mosque bearing his mother’s maiden name. His father went inside and was told that a Yavaşça ancestor had been the Ottoman admiral at the conquest of Constantinople behind the famous maneuver of moving ships overland past the city’s defenses in 1453.

These two origin stories, as told by Cenk Uygur, tell us a great deal about how Cenk sees his background, and through it, how he sees himself. One branch of his family may hail back to a famous Ottoman admiral, and the other grew up doing manual labor on a farm without electricity. 

In 1978, when Cenk was eight, his family moved to the United States. About two weeks after the move, Cenk recalls waking up in the middle of the night sobbing. His father found Cenk at the top of the stairs and put an arm around him. Cenk wanted to see his friends and family from İstanbul again, but Doğan told him they were in New Jersey to stay. Doğan then built a commercial real estate business called Doğan Uygur & Associates, which, by Cenk’s account, grew so big it eventually employed “a ton of people.”

Cenk graduated from high school in East Brunswick, studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and earned a law degree from Columbia. He practiced law before turning to talk radio and television, financed primarily by his father. 

In 1991, while Cenk was still in college, Cenk’s sister, Sedef, gave birth to Hasan Piker and moved back to Turkey to raise Hasan in İstanbul and Ankara. Piker calls his upbringing “fairly affluent.” His parents sent him to public school, in part to ensure that he knew children who were not rich, and he spent summers with his grandparents in the United States, eventually staying to attend college.

In 1991, the same year Hasan was born, Cenk Uygur published an article in Penn’s Daily Pennsylvanian disputing that the Ottoman destruction of the Armenian population was genocide (an article which has since been removed from the outlet’s main website.). In 1999, he argued the point again in a letter to Salon. 

Cenk Uygur was proud of his Turkish heritage and refused to believe that the real Young Turks—not Billy and Patti from the Rod Stewart song, but Mehmed Talât Paşa, İsmail Enver Paşa, and Ahmed Djemal (Cemâl) Paşa—had done anything wrong. These three men—the “Three Pashas,” as they were called—planned, organized, and carried out the murder of as many as 1.2 million Armenian civilians. Estimates for the percentage of Turkish Armenians killed go as high as 80%.

In 2002, Uygur commemorated the Young Turks by naming his new satellite radio show after them, and over time his show became one of the largest independent networks on the American left, making Cenk one of the more recognizable faces of progressive political commentary.

Cenk claims he named his group “Young Turks” based on the English idiom for a rebellious reformer, with no reference to the Armenian Genocide, but that would be like a German moving from Nuremberg and forming a broadcast network called “the Nazis” while claiming not to know what an actual Nazi is. I can believe that Rod Stewart did not know the full history of that name, but Cenk Uygur knew exactly who the historical Young Turks were, having written twice to deny the genocide before picking that name for his network.

Piker went to Rutgers and, after graduation in 2013, joined his uncle at The Young Turks. He started on the business side, but, by 2016, Piker had his own program, The Breakdown. That same year, Cenk publicly rescinded his earlier statements about the Armenian Genocide. He said he had mistaken himself for a historian. He later acknowledged the genocide. The network he founded, however, retained the name the Young Turks anyway.

If Cenk Uygur had a shred of decency, he would change his network’s name.

Piker meanwhile began streaming on Twitch in 2018 while still at The Young Turks. The network gave him a show called Agitprop, and then, in 2020, he left to stream full-time on Twitch. Agitprop is short for agitation and propaganda. The show was explicitly billed as an examination of post-capitalist ideas and was designed to do exactly what the name says: spread propaganda and agitate America’s youth.

Cenk Uygur now acknowledges the Armenian genocide and condemns the Holocaust, yet, in an October 2025 discussion, he used both atrocities to argue that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. After saying that the Holocaust and the pogroms against Jews were “disgusting,” he immediately then defended comparing Israeli soldiers to the SS. He invoked the Armenian dead, acknowledged that Turks had slaughtered them, and immediately returned back to his charge that Jewish history was being used to shield Israel while Israel supposedly does the same thing.

Cenk Uygur can admit that the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide were both real—but only to use both events as cudgels against Israel.

Hasan Piker made a related move on Pod Save America. While arguing that Israeli politics had shifted rightward, he cited the Armenian Genocide as an example of what Turkish nationalism had taught him to deny. He said the genocide was real, then turned directly back to his description of Israel as an apartheid state that the United States must restrain. Piker has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide—almost as a way of reducing the Armenian Genocide to just an amateur roadside gang murder.

Genocide is a word with a definition. It involves the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

Israel says its objective is to defeat Hamas, and it contacts civilians with evacuation instructions by phone, text, and leaflet before operations. It also forgoes strikes when it feels the likely civilian toll would be too high, and, by May of 2024, Israel reported facilitating the entry of more than 380,000 tons of food and 23,000 tons of medical supplies into Gaza. This was something the government did despite livid protest from many Israelis who felt that the population which had carried out and rejoiced at the massacre of October 7—itself arguably an act of attempted genocide—was being rewarded, coddled, and encouraged to continue the war.

Israel could commit genocide in Gaza if it wanted to, but it sends troops in to hunt Hamas militants door to door and room to room instead, putting its own soldiers in harm’s way to kill as few civilians as possible.

Hamas, in the meantime, uses human shields, hiding behind the very civilian population it is supposed to govern and forcing Israel to kill as many civilians as Hamas can manage. Hamas has repeatedly been caught sending civilians toward Israeli aid vehicles only to then fire through the civilians toward the IDF soldiers, forcing the IDF soldiers to return fire, and then blaming Israel for the deaths. Hamas hides command centers under hospitals and puts rocket launchers on apartment buildings.

Hamas leaders have openly bragged that they love death more than Israelis love life, which lays bare the difference between a force that treats civilian deaths as a cost to be avoided and one whose leaders glorify it. Even by Hamas’ own, questionable numbers, Israel has killed one militant for every civilian, which is the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare. Hamas knows that Westerners are soft, ideologically brainwashed, and completely ignorant of the realities of war, and uses civilians as shields specifically to weaken Western resolve. This has been so successful as of late in turning the world against Israel that it threatens to normalize the use of civilians as human shields worldwide.

Think of what the future of warfare will look like if using civilians as shields becomes normalized.

Both Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur have dismissed the use of civilian shields as an explanation for civilian deaths in Gaza; Uygur explicitly rejected Piers Morgan’s claim about Hamas using hospitals to hide command centers. This is in spite of the fact that Hamas brags about the practice. In a 2014 Al-Aqsa TV statement, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri praised civilians standing in front of Israeli airstrikes to protect homes and called on Palestinians to continue the practice. A NATO Strategic Communications Centre report quotes him saying, “I believe this strategy is proving itself.” The report also records an earlier Hamas spokesman saying civilians would continue to “serve as human shields.” 

Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker are willfully spreading propaganda they know is not true—or Agitprop, as Piker’s former show called it—to propagandize and agitate the public against Israel.

What is happening in Gaza is tragic, but it is Hamas committing the atrocities—not Israel. Calling Israel guilty of “genocide” is absurd. 

In 2019, while discussing American policy in the Middle East, Piker declared that “America deserved 9/11, dude.” Piker said that Hamas was “a thousand times better” than Israel. He has said he has no issue with Hezbollah and agreed to a comparison between a Houthi figure and Anne Frank. 

More recently, Piker told Axios that, “pound for pound,” the United States had committed more terrorism than al-Qaeda. Asked about his praise for Máo Zédōng, he called Máo “a great man of history” and described deaths from famine and mismanagement as mere “excesses.” Piker has denounced capitalism and said of landlords, “Kill those motherf—ers and murder those motherf—ers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f—ing red capitalist blood, dude.”

Not to be outdone by his nephew, as Cenk Uygur wrote in 2025, “It is not antisemitic to say Israel controls Congress.” Promoting a 2026 interview, he claimed that “94% of Congress works for Israel” and that American presidents had been bribed by the Israeli lobby. During a July 2025 debate, Uygur called Israel “a genocidal terrorist state that thinks it owns America.” He said AIPAC had bought the U.S. government and concluded, “We’re occupied. We’re all Palestinians now.” In that same debate, he compared Israeli leaders to Germans rationalizing what they did to Jews. In 2026, he also described Israeli actions in Lebanon as following “Nazi logic.”

None of this is true. Uygur and Piker know these allegations are false. They spread the lies anyway.

And really the fault does not end with Uygur and Piker, as it also lies with the public at large. Uygur and Piker are nothing more than modern snake-oil salesmen, spreading lies for money. The real culprits are the investors who flood them with cash, the TV personalities who put them on the air, the politicians who share stages with them, and the audiences who tune in daily to listen to their drivel.

Falsehoods sell. Today, anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, and anti-American lies are en vogue, and Cenk Uygur has been incredibly successful in America as a result. By 2017, The Young Turks reported more than 30,000 paying subscribers and 200 million monthly video views, raising $20 million from investors to expand. Celebrity Net Worth has Uygur personally worth $10 million.

Piker has an audience of around 3 million, and Celebrity Net Worth estimated his fortune to also be around $10 million. In 2021, Piker bought a Los Angeles home for $2.7 million. Piker told Wired that one of his first splurges after earning money on Twitch was leasing a Porsche.

There is nothing wrong with either man becoming wealthy in America. I commend people for doing well, as these men have, and as did Cenk’s father.

Doğan Uygur came here hoping his family would have opportunities they could never find in Turkey. He left a farm without electricity, earned an education, built a business, and brought his family to America where he built a second business even more successful than his first one. His son went to Wharton and Columbia, then built one of the largest independent media companies on the political left. Doğan’s grandson became wealthy speaking to millions of Americans from a room in Los Angeles. Doğan and his family have done remarkably well in America, and he knows it: the subtitle of Doğan’s 2020 memoir is “Stories and Life Lessons from an American Dream Come True.”

Doğan is also a proud father, though, and one with some of the same faults as his son. The actual title of his memoir is The Original Young Turk.

Why pluralism collapses without self-limiting rules of engagement.

Imagine watching two bitter rivals step onto a field for a high-stakes championship game, only to discover that neither team has agreed on the rules, where the out-of-bounds lines are painted, or who gets to blow the whistle. Every play sparks a brawl. The players spend more time inventing penalties on the fly to handicap their opponents than actually playing, and the moment a call goes against them, they threaten to quit and take the ball home.

That is the exact state of our public life today. Except in the real world, we cannot take our ball and go home.

We do not have the luxury of total separation. We share the same economy, work in the same offices, live in the same neighborhoods, and inhabit the same constitutional republic. We are stuck with each other. In a free, diverse society with competing factions, differing priorities, and clashing interests, conflict is inevitable. The only way a pluralistic democracy survives that friction is by agreeing in advance on neutral principles to balance those competing demands.

Yet increasingly, we have abandoned that discipline. In its place, a sensationalist media machine and partisan operatives have seized control of the terms of debate. Their business model relies on high-arousal hostility and crude binary sorting tests: Are you team red or blue? Pro- or anti-Israel?

Once an issue is forced into these crude, binary proxies, honest problem-solving dies. The stakes are instantly elevated to existential threats: you are either with the tribe or enabling the enemy. Sensible people quickly realize that offering nuance or seeking common ground will only get them smeared as traitors by their own side. So they shut up. The loudest, most unhinged voices capture the microphones, and the entire public square surrenders to a partisan heckler’s veto.

We cannot go on like this. Before we can resolve any cultural flashpoint or policy dispute, we must re-establish the rules of engagement.

Those rules are what we call principles. In science or logic, a principle describes an unbending law of reality. In human affairs, it is something we must choose to uphold: an invariant rule of engagement that governs power, justice, and conduct. A real principle does not bend to protect an ally, nor does it twist to handicap an enemy. It is the steady standard that makes fierce competition possible without destroying the competitors.

Our most durable laws and institutions were built on this foundation. Concepts like due process, equal protection, and the presumption of innocence are not arbitrary technicalities; they are foundational principles codified into statute to prevent raw power from dictating justice. But while the formal legal system has courts and sheriffs to enforce those baselines, the vast space of civic, political, and cultural discourse has no statutory referee. Out here, in the unlegislated commons of public life, principles are the only guardrails we have. When we trade them away for tribal advantage, there is no backstop to catch us.

Most of us already live by these principles every day—whether through the unwritten norms that govern our neighborhoods, or the explicit guardrails business leaders use to steer their organizations. I saw this dynamic firsthand during my thirteen years at Google, where surviving factional conflict was not an academic question but an operational necessity. In an organization of that scale, different teams have fundamentally clashing priorities—engineering velocity versus user safety, short-term revenue versus durable platform integrity. If decisions are made based on which faction holds the most internal leverage or shouts the loudest in a given week, trust collapses and the system fractures. The only way competing teams can pursue their goals without tearing the enterprise apart is to submit to non-negotiable principles that balance power. Those guardrails do not eliminate friction; they define the boundaries of legitimate competition.

As this example or any other complex organization demonstrates, a single principle is never enough. To balance competing powers, principles must be self-limiting. They must operate as an interlocking ecosystem of mutual counterweights, defining not only the principle they protect, but the precise boundary where their authority yields to let a competing principle breathe.

This operational fairness relies on the Principle of Reversibility, applied through two mirror tests:

The first is the Role Reversal Test: Would you defend this exact rule, standard of evidence, or social consequence if your fiercest political adversaries applied it directly to you and your allies tomorrow?

The second is the Proximity Test: Would you still uphold this standard if the person stepping over the line were your closest political ally, a valued colleague, or a close friend?

If the answer to either is no, you are not defending a principle. You are effectively arguing for power.

Of course, in the unlegislated arena of civic life, there are no neutral referees wearing striped shirts to throw flags for unsportsmanlike conduct.

When self-appointed culture warriors try to micromanage tone or impose their preferred ideological virtues on everyone else, the accusation of acting like a “morality police” is well-earned. Referees do not dictate creative play, nor should they police thought. Their only job is to mark the boundary and blow the whistle when someone steps out of bounds. In a free society, the only way to avoid both state censorship and the tyranny of a partisan mob is for all of us to collectively act as the referees when somebody crosses that uncrossable line.

That distributed accountability only works if everyone agrees on the non-negotiable boundary: the absolute rejection of eliminationist hatred, the unconditional refusal to excuse or celebrate political violence, and the guarantee of principled, symmetric accountability regardless of who offends. When that moral boundary is instead treated as a partisan bargaining chip, society descends into gang warfare. Over the past decade, public accountability devolved into an asymmetric regime of viral mobbing and selective outrage, met by scorched-earth retaliation from the other side. Because these attacks are so transparently tribal, they fail to deter bad behavior. The target feels no shame; they dig in, their tribe rallies around them as a political casualty, and shameless defiance becomes the only rational survival strategy.

We see the catastrophic destination of that race to the bottom today: partisans excusing ideological allies who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk, while pointing fingers across the aisle at opponents who cheered the murder of Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman. When we refuse to hold our own tribe accountable to the same moral taboos we demand of our enemies, we do not just lose an argument. We dismantle the floor that prevents political conflict from turning into bloodshed.

In an attention economy that rewards instant outrage and “owning” the other side, holding your own side to the principle of rejecting dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric is often mocked as naive, or dismissed as unilateral disarmament.

In truth, it is the only viable peace treaty available.

Living by principles does not mean handling bad actors with kid gloves or severing every human connection with someone who errs. It means that when we evaluate conduct, set boundaries, or enforce consequences, we do so on grounds so objective, transparent, and symmetric that even an adversary cannot credibly dismiss them as a partisan hit job.

If we continue letting partisans dictate the terms of debate, every cultural skirmish will lower the bar until no shared civic life remains. We cannot leave the field. We cannot take our ball home. Our only viable path is to submit our own tribes to the discipline of universal principles—and start judging public life by the rules of the game, not the color of the jersey.

For almost two years, it was hidden in plain sight.

Abraham.

Sarah.

Hagar.

Ishmael.

Isaac.

And the Angel of the Lord.

One family.

Together.

As far as I have been able to determine, there is no other known work of art that brings all six of these biblical figures together in a single image specifically created around the idea of the reconciliation of Abraham’s first family.

And yet, for almost two years, hardly anyone knew it was there.

I had quietly placed it inside my 18th mural in Israel, at the First Station in Jerusalem. It was surrounded by the faces of the women of Iran. Looking back now, I think of those two years as a pregnancy.

The image had been conceived. It existed. It was alive. But it had not yet been born into the purpose I believe it was created for. Now it has.

And its birthplace as a stand-alone mural is Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Number 18

My journey into public art began with Iran.

I was born in Iran. My mother and I escaped in 1978, shortly before the Islamic Revolution transformed the country of my birth.

More than four decades later, after the death of Mahsa Amini and the beginning of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, Iran came roaring back into my life.

I became the only artist asked by the State of Israel to create a series of murals in support of the women of Iran.

One mural became another.

Jerusalem.

Nazareth.

Netanya.

Tel Aviv.

Tzfat.

Faces of Iranian women began appearing across Israel.

Women who had been murdered.

Women who had been imprisoned.

Women who had been blinded.

Women whose only crime was demanding freedom.

Early in this journey, the number 18 became deeply significant to me. In Jewish tradition, 18 represents chai—“life.” I believed I was supposed to complete 18 murals in Israel. But somewhere on the journey toward mural number 18, something interrupted my plan.

I have learned something about interruptions. Sometimes the interruption is the plan.

The 16th Mural + an Unexpected Assignment

Around the time I was working on my 16th mural, I was approached by a conservative Christian organization about creating something completely different.

They wanted an image connected to the Abraham Accords.

Until then, almost everything I had been creating was centered on Iran, Israel, and the women fighting for freedom. Suddenly, I was thinking about Abraham.

I began asking a question:

What do the Abraham Accords actually look like?

Not a photograph of politicians signing documents.

Not flags.

Not government buildings.

Not another diplomatic photograph.

What does the spiritual idea behind the Abraham Accords look like? The answer was right there in the name. Abraham.

And there is something remarkable in the language surrounding the Accords themselves.

The Abraham Accords recognize the historic connection between the Arab and Jewish peoples through their common ancestor, Abraham, and speak about fostering peace, coexistence, mutual understanding, and respect.

That stopped me.

Because suddenly I wasn’t thinking about countries. I was thinking about a family.

Before there were modern nations, there was a family.

Before there were borders, there was a family.

Before there were peace treaties, wars, negotiations, and diplomatic relations, there was a family.

And that family began with Abraham.

So I asked myself: “What if the Abraham Accords could be represented not by politicians, but by Abraham’s family?”

That question became the image.

The First Family

To understand the artwork, you have to go back to Genesis.

Abraham (then Abram) and Sarah (then Sarai) had been promised a child, but year after year passed and Sarah remained unable to conceive.

Eventually Hagar entered the story. Hagar bore Abraham a son. His name was Ishmael.

Genesis 16:16 tells us: “Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.”

Then something extraordinary happened. Fourteen years later, the impossible promise was fulfilled. Sarah conceived.

Genesis 21 tells us that Abraham was 100-years-old when Isaac was born. That means Ishmael was approximately 14 when Isaac entered the family.

For a period of time, there were two sons under the household of Abraham:

Ishmael.

Isaac.

Two mothers.

Hagar.

Sarah.

And one father.

Abraham.

But the family fractured.

Genesis 21 records Hagar and Ishmael being sent away. Hagar found herself in the wilderness with her son, believing she was about to watch him die.

But God had not abandoned them.

God heard the boy.

An angel of God called to Hagar from heaven.

God opened her eyes to a well of water.

And Ishmael lived.

This is important. Ishmael is not forgotten by God in Genesis. God makes promises concerning him.

God hears him.

God preserves him.

And Isaac also carries God’s covenant promise.

Two sons.

Two destinies.

One father.

And a family marked by separation. Thousands of years later, that separation still echoes through history.

So I wanted to create something that Scripture does not explicitly give us.

An image of the family reunited. Not an attempt to rewrite Genesis. Not a claim that this exact scene happened historically. But an artistic vision of reconciliation.

The Image

In the picture stands Abraham.

Beside him is Sarah.

There is Hagar.

There is Ishmael.

There is Isaac.

And watching over this family is the Angel of the Lord.

I deliberately designed the relationships within the image. Sarah looks toward Ishmael. Hagar looks toward Isaac.

Each mother is looking beyond her own biological child. That matters. Because reconciliation begins when we can see someone else’s child as precious, too.

Abraham stands with the family that came from him.

Isaac and Ishmael occupy the same image.

Nobody has been erased.

Nobody has been replaced.

Nobody has been asked to surrender his identity.

And above them is the presence of heaven.

As far as I have been able to discover, this may be the only image depicting Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac, and the Angel of the Lord together specifically in the spirit of reconciliation.

To me, this image is the Abraham Accords.

The Accords speak about descendants of Abraham learning to live beside one another. The picture allows us to see that idea. The Abraham Accords say that peace is possible. The picture asks us to imagine what that peace looks like when it becomes personal.

Not countries.

Not governments.

Not politicians.

A family.

The Mural Inside the Mural

But then something unexpected happened.

The image didn’t immediately become a stand-alone mural. Instead, I hid it inside another mural. My 18th mural in Israel.

In October of 2024, at the First Station in Jerusalem, I completed the mural that represented the culmination of the number 18 I had been carrying throughout this journey.

The larger mural was dedicated to Iran.

Faces of Iranian women surrounded it.

And quietly, almost secretly, I placed Abraham’s reunited family among them. Most people looking at the enormous mural probably had no idea what they were seeing.

There was no major unveiling of the Abraham image.

There was no campaign announcing it.

There was no explanation of where it would eventually go.

It simply existed.

And it waited.

Looking back now, I believe something beautiful happened. The Abraham Accords image entered the womb of the 18th mural.

It was surrounded by women.

It was carried in Jerusalem.

And for almost two years, it waited to be born.

Think about that.

An image about reconciliation between the descendants of Abraham was hidden inside a mural dedicated to the women of Iran. A Persian story carrying an Abrahamic story.

Iran.

Israel.

Abraham.

Sarah.

Hagar.

Ishmael.

Isaac.

All occupying the same wall.

I could never have planned what would eventually happen to this image.

I simply knew I needed to put it there.

Two Years in the Womb

There are times when something God gives us appears to be dormant. Nothing seems to be happening.

The promise exists, but we cannot see where it is going. The seed has been planted, but nothing has broken through the ground. The child exists, but it has not yet been born.

That is how I now see these two years.

The image wasn’t dead.

It was gestating.

The Abraham Accords mural was waiting.

And eventually, a church in Minnesota said “yes.”

A Courageous Church

That church is Yesuah’s Love Heals Ministry in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It is overseen by Pastors Max and Quinn. And I believe what they did required courage. Because reconciliation is beautiful when it remains an abstract idea. It becomes much more difficult when reconciliation has faces.

Sarah and Hagar.

Isaac and Ishmael.

Jews and Arabs.

Different histories.

Different wounds.

Different narratives.

One family.

Max and Quinn were willing to put that image on their wall.

They were willing to say: “We believe reconciliation is possible.” They were willing to give the Abraham Accords image a home.

And, on September 27, 2026, almost two years after I had hidden this image inside my 18th mural in Jerusalem, we gathered in Minneapolis for its unveiling.

The Unveiling

The program itself felt more like worship than an art exhibition.

Pastors Max and Quinn welcomed everyone.

Hashivenu Adonai was part of the gathering—a phrase meaning, “Return us, O Lord,” language drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures.

Nancy Santiago participated. Max and Quinn introduced me and allowed me to tell the extraordinary story of how this image had traveled from an idea to Jerusalem and ultimately to their church.

We were also joined by honored speaker Dr. Billye Brim.

Then came “Oceans.” A closing song.

Prayer.

Worship.

And finally, everyone was invited into Fellowship Hall.

It was time.

After almost two years inside another mural, Abraham’s family was about to emerge.

The image that had been hidden was uncovered.

The mural was born.

This is the Abraham Accords

Standing before the completed mural, something became even clearer to me. This image tells the story of the Abraham Accords in a way words sometimes cannot.

What are the Abraham Accords ultimately asking humanity to believe? That history does not have to dictate destiny. That yesterday’s enemies do not have to remain tomorrow’s enemies.

That coexistence is possible.

That peace is possible.

That the descendants of Abraham can recognize something in one another that existed before all of our divisions.

A shared father. Abraham. That is why I believe this image can become a symbol for the Abraham Accords.

The Abraham Accords need more than signatures.

They need stories.

They need music.

They need conversations.

They need art.

They need images that ordinary people can understand without reading pages of diplomatic language.

And what could be simpler than this?

Abraham’s family reunited.

Sarah Looks at Ishmael

There is one detail of this mural that may be the most important.

Sarah is not simply looking at Isaac.

She looks toward Ishmael.

And Hagar does not simply look at Ishmael.

She looks toward Isaac.

Why?

Because reconciliation requires us to look across the divide. It requires us to see the other person’s child.

The other person’s pain.

The other person’s history.

The other person’s humanity.

Sarah sees Ishmael.

Hagar sees Isaac.

And suddenly the picture changes.

It is no longer:

My son versus your son.

It becomes:

Our family.

That is the Abraham Accords.

What is a Mural?

After creating 32 murals, I no longer believe murals are simply paint on walls. I believe murals can become banners. They can become shields. They can become altars.

And I believe they can become portals—physical places that invite people to stop, remember, pray and encounter a story larger than themselves.

A mural claims physical territory for an idea.

It says:

Remember this.

When I put the faces of murdered Iranian women on walls, those murals declare:

Remember her.

Say her name.

Do not let her disappear.

But this mural makes another declaration:

Remember the family.

Remember Abraham.

Remember Sarah.

Remember Hagar.

Remember Ishmael.

Remember Isaac.

Remember that before thousands of years of conflict, there was a family.

And imagine what could happen if the family could see itself as family again.

Could This Become a Symbol?

I have a dream for this image. I would love to see it adopted and shared as an artistic symbol of the Abraham Accords.

Not replacing any official emblem.

Not belonging to a political party.

Not belonging to one nation.

But becoming a visual representation of the idea at the heart of the Accords. Imagine this picture displayed wherever the Abraham Accords are discussed.

Imagine it in churches.

Synagogues.

Schools.

Cultural institutions.

Public spaces.

Peace gatherings.

Imagine Jewish children looking at Ishmael.

Imagine Arab children looking at Isaac.

Imagine people who have inherited generations of distrust standing before one picture and realizing:

We are looking at the same family.

Perhaps art can go somewhere politics cannot.

Perhaps an image can enter a heart before an argument begins.

Perhaps Abraham’s family can remind Abraham’s descendants that peace is not betrayal.

Reconciliation is not weakness.

Seeing the humanity of the other does not require surrendering your own identity. That is why nobody disappears from this mural.

Isaac remains Isaac.

Ishmael remains Ishmael.

Sarah remains Sarah.

Hagar remains Hagar.

Reconciliation doesn’t erase identity.

It changes the relationship.

The Women Who Carried the Image

There is one final part of this story about which I cannot stop thinking. For almost two years, this image of Abraham’s family was surrounded by the women of Iran.

Women who stood against tyranny.

Women who risked everything for freedom.

Women who refused to accept that the world had to remain as it was.

Maybe that is why the Abraham image belonged inside that mural for a season.

Because both stories make essentially the same declaration:

The future does not have to look like the past.

The women of Iran are declaring that oppression does not have to be permanent.

The Abraham Accords declare that hostility does not have to be permanent.

And this image declares that separation does not have to be permanent.

All three require courage.

All three require faith.

All three require someone willing to imagine something that does not yet exist.

From Jerusalem to Minnesota

When I stood in front of my 18th mural at Jerusalem’s First Station in October of 2024, I did not know what would happen to the small Abraham image I had placed inside it.

I didn’t know where it would eventually go.

I didn’t know whether anyone would ever understand why it was there.

Maybe I wasn’t supposed to know.

Sometimes we want God to show us the entire story before we agree to take the first step.

But sometimes our responsibility is simply to be faithful with the piece we have been given.

Paint the picture.

Put it on the wall.

Let it wait.

For almost two years, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac waited together inside my 18th mural.

Then a courageous church in Minnesota opened its doors.

The womb opened.

And the picture was born. Now the First Family has a wall of its own. But I do not believe Minnesota is the end of this image’s journey. I believe it may only be the beginning.

My prayer is that one day people around the world will look at this image and immediately recognize what it represents:

The Abraham Accords.

Not simply an agreement between governments.

A declaration that reconciliation is possible.

A reminder that the Arab and Jewish peoples trace their histories back to Abraham. And a picture of what could happen when a divided family begins moving toward one another again.

Abraham.

Sarah.

Hagar.

Ishmael.

Isaac.

The Angel of the Lord.

One image.

One family.

Thousands of years of separation.

And perhaps a new chapter.

Reconciliation.

The Spectator ran an article recently arguing that libertarianism is dead. Nobody serious, according to the Spectator, still believes in free markets or unqualified liberty. Everyone, according to the Spectator, understands that markets need to be used for the “common good,” and that people exist not for their own selfish needs but for the “common good” as well. Supposedly, even Marco Rubio, the great savior of the Enlightenment Cause, understands that the days of liberty have come to their logical end, and that the American Experiment has failed.

J. D. Vance, of course, believes this. He just published a whole book titled Communion about it. The American Experiment has supposedly failed to provide the “common good,” and thus we need to rebuild the United States into something else.

Interestingly, the United States is also the richest and most powerful country in human history, and it just hit its highest mark ever for inflation-adjusted income, regardless of whether measured by average income or median income. Apparently, the Spectator does not consider that relevant when discussing the “common good,” but it sounds pretty good to me.

As someone running a website called The Daily Libertarian, color me what the Spectator calls “unserious.” I don’t want to give the Spectator the power to define the “common good,” and nor do I want to give that to J. D. Vance. I still think we each have a right to define what “good” means in our own, individual lives.

But that does not mean the Spectator is entirely wrong. Ben Shapiro, for example, now uses “a fishhook,” or even, “a horseshoe” to denote the left-right political spectrum, with the political right beginning to look very much like the political left once you move far enough over.

I don’t generally disagree with Ben Shapiro, but, in this case, I disagree a great deal. I think the correct left-right spectrum runs from totalitarianism on the left to anarchy on the right, and though one can argue that Karl Marx believed communism would lead to a state without government, Marx’s vision was hardly anarchy. Marx believed communism would organize itself in such a way that government would become unnecessary, but that’s a self-sustaining organization, which is very different from anarchy.

The political left-right spectrum still stands with totalitarianism on the extreme left, and anarchy on the extreme right. This spectrum only captures one aspect of political philosophy, but it is the most important one as it is the one that distinguishes types of government based on power.

There are other forms of political philosophy. Human beings aren’t sovereign atoms. We inherit obligations before we are capable of choosing them. We inhabit a culture and inherit a language. Civilization requires individuals who voluntarily shoulder responsibilities they never invented, so the question is for what things is government responsible, and for what things we as citizens bear some responsibility outside of government.

This brings us back to the Spectator’s statement that even Marco Rubio understands that capitalism must be “common-good capitalism.” Rubio believes individuals are generally free to define and pursue the good in their own lives, and while he does believe the government has a legitimate role in maintaining the economic and social conditions necessary for the “common good,” he believes in doing so fully within our Constitutional framework.

I go further than Rubio. I  believe that we all have the right to define what is “good” in our own lives, and that the “common good” is the organizing framework within which we are free to do so. In other words, a free market is the “common good,” with the government’s role limited to keeping the rules fair.

To me, the government only has two roles in the economy:

1. To promote and protect market efficiencies, and
2. To provide those legitimate societal needs that run counter to market efficiencies.

The first role is the primary one, and even when performing the second role (which reflects societal needs—not individual or group needs), the government should always act in ways that keep the markets as efficient as possible—and civil, through a court system which mediates lawsuits. The second role includes things such as police and fire protection, national defense, and building roads. Ensuring that the environment is not polluted would also qualify, although again, the goal is to minimize market intrusions and not to take over industries.

I also agree that there is such a thing as the “common good.” I just don’t want the government to define it, as doing so presupposes enough power to create it. I also think those who blame individualism for the end of the “common good” are missing the mark. Individualism inevitably leads to the concept of “your rights end where mine begin,” which is reciprocal, implying a morality of equality under the law and of mutual benefit. It allows a government to create and enforce laws that prevent us from infringing on one another’s rights, but it also presupposes that there are some things that are immoral but outside the power of government to mandate.

Some sin is outside the purview of government, and must be left for God to judge.

I like to think if I had a conversation with Rubio, he would largely agree with me and would try to fit his “common good” into my framework. I think Ben Shapiro probably would agree as well, so let us look back at his fishhook metaphor, as I think comparing Rubio to Vance may prove Shapiro wrong.

I see what Shapiro sees, but what he sees as the “turn” in the right is actually a fork in the road leading to the alt-right. Understanding Ben’s point requires understanding what the alt-right is, exactly, and once we draw that distinction I think we can safely place Rubio on the right side of the spectrum, whereas when we look at Vance, we may see something else entirely.

“Alt-right” is a phrase concocted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, to denote what he saw as an “alternative to the right” in opposition to the left. In other words, it was not a part of the actual right, but something altogether different.

I did a long-form essay on the alt-right which I recommend. For now, suffice it to say that there can be multiple alternatives to the right, and that Richard Spencer’s white nationalism is but one of them. Really, the left created Richard Spencer’s alternative by focusing so heavily on intersectionality—and predominantly on racial intersectionality with white people as the oppressive majority—that they all but asked for a white supremacist or white nationalist alternative to emerge. The more the left looked at white people and said, “You are the bad guys,” the more they also were encouraging a mirror-image of themselves to emerge that went beyond saying, “No, we are not.”

I have bad news for the political left, but Richard Spencer or Nick Fuentes (the more recent version) would fit in very well on the political left if they only flipped their preferred racial hierarchy. As I said in my article on the alt-right, if you “blindfold Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nick Fuentes, they might fall in love.”

I also said, “Nick Fuentes’s followers are the political equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys. We need to speak to them firmly, but with compassion, as some of them can likely be saved. The actual right believes their beliefs to be immoral, but we separate the sin from the sinner and offer redemption to those who repent,” and that sentiment follows not just Nick Fuentes’ followers, but also followers of other versions of the alt-right—including J. D. Vance.

I recently did a book review of Vance’s Communion in which I called his book “a political justification, disguised as a Catholic apologetic, disguised as a memoir.” I called it a “political justification” as he lays the groundwork to justify his version of the alt-right, but stops short of making any specific policy proposals. I wanted to be fair to his book, so I did not go any deeper into post-liberalism than he did, but this is a critical topic as we head toward the 2028 primaries, so I wanted to write an article specific to Vance’s post-liberalism as well. 

We need to understand those who are running, and, in the case of Vance, we need to understand that he is, in some ways, much more like Richard Spencer than he is like Marco Rubio.

Richard Spencer’s version of the alt-right is racial first. He envisions a white ethno-state and has been remarkably open about the fact that such a state would require replacing the American political order rather than conserving it. Spencer has even described his vision as “revolutionary.” He is not particularly interested in preserving American constitutional conservatism because he does not believe the American constitutional system can produce the racially organized society he wants.

Spencer is also not particularly Christian. In fact, Christianity presents something of a problem for his worldview. Christianity is universal: salvation is available regardless of race, nationality, or ethnicity, and the Church transcends all three. Spencer’s organizing principle is instead racial identity. The nation exists principally for a particular people, and political and economic institutions should serve that people.

Spencer ties race to culture. He says the two things are inseparable, and calls for different races to live separately from one another. Nick Fuentes represents an important evolution of that idea. Fuentes retains racial identity as an important component of his politics, but combines it with Catholic traditionalism, Christian nationalism, and an “America First” political identity. Where Spencer is comfortable trying to build a new political movement, Fuentes has been far more interested in capturing and transforming the existing American right.

I even had a handful of Fuentes’ “groypers” reach out to me through Facebook a few months ago. They were remarkably polite, but they were trying to see if I could be brought on board with their movement. I tried to convert them to actual conservatism instead, and once they realized I was not interested in changing sides, only in getting them to do so, they promptly left.

Fuentes has said that he “is a fan of Stalin,” and that “it’s actually courageous to support Stalin.” He’s also said that Hitler was “really f—king cool.” He presents himself as conservative, traditionalist, Catholic, and nationalist, even though the political system he advocates would be very different from traditional American constitutional conservatism—something totalitarian and totally unafraid of killing the masses to get and use political power. He grasp of what you might call “behavioral traditionalism” is also rather lax to say the least.

This makes Fuentes particularly interesting for purposes of understanding J. D. Vance. Spencer makes race the organizing principle and has little use for Christianity when Christianity gets in its way. Fuentes attempts to combine racial nationalism with Catholic Christian nationalism. Vance removes the racial component altogether—even while he is sometimes loath to offend those who champion it—but retains Christian nationalism, Catholicism, hostility to individualism, skepticism of free markets, and the belief that economic policy should be used deliberately to rebuild a preferred national culture.

I honestly really liked J. D. Vance when Trump picked him as a running mate. Not only is he highly intelligent and a master debater—one who destroyed Tim Walz without needing to insult him—but he is also a fellow Marine. I assumed that, as a Republican, he had political views similar to my own. I saw him as a great communicator and thought we might have found the next Ronald Reagan.

I was wrong. 

J. D. Vance is a Catholic “post-liberal.” “Post-liberalism” is not post-leftism, but post classical liberalism, or post-Enlightenment. One might even call J. D. Vance a post-conservative, as he wants to do away with everything a true conservative wants to preserve.

J. D. Vance does not hide the fact that he is a post-liberal. He has publicly identified himself with the “post-liberal right,” and his conversion to Catholicism in 2019 gave him an intellectual framework through which to reinterpret the economic and social problems he had already spent years discussing. Vance wrote that he had been looking for a worldview capable of understanding human behavior as simultaneously individual and social, as well as moral and structural. Catholicism provided one.

Vance’s economic views follow. He is skeptical of free trade, globalization, large corporations, and the idea that voluntary market outcomes are inherently best. He has argued that social conservatism needs a broader “vision of political economy, and the common good.” Catholic post-liberals similarly argue that economic freedom must be judged according to whether it produces the kind of families, communities, and nation they believe society requires. Markets cease to be mechanisms through which individuals primarily pursue their own interests, and become instruments whose outcomes can be encouraged, discouraged, or redirected according to a prior conception of the “common good.”

The “common good” is a recurring theme in post-liberal circles. We should be concerned about that, as it requires someone to define what that phrase means. Vance does not want to reduce government power. He wants to broadly expand it, and then to use that power to rebuild our country into his personal vision of what he thinks society should look like.

Vance’s views on personal liberty follow. Post-liberals believe liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy has produced atomization: weaker families, weaker communities, declining religious authority, collapsing birthrates, and people increasingly detached from duties to one another. Vance consequently emphasizes obligation, family, community, nation, and social stability. Post-liberals view government as paternalistic—almost like a national parent—and want it to have broad powers to manage and control the population. This is in direct opposition to the concept of personal liberty.

This does not necessarily mean that Vance has endorsed Catholic integralism, in which political authority and the Catholic Church would formally cooperate in governing society. He has not identified himself as an integralist, and he has acknowledged both America’s religious pluralism and the political reality that many Catholic teachings would never find majority support. But he has said that his conception of the optimal state follows Catholic social teaching, has associated himself with prominent Catholic post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen, and he has spoken approvingly about replacing the existing institutional order with one directed toward what post-liberals call the “common good.”

There’s that phrase again, and that last point is particularly important. Vance’s post-liberalism is not just the argument that Americans should voluntarily become more religious, have more children, attend church, and rebuild their communities. He has argued that political power and institutions have a role to play toward molding society in his image. He has spoken of being “ruthless” in exercising political power and of taking control of institutions, including universities, so they can force the public to submit to Vance’s vision.

And the word “ruthless” implies force, when needed. 

Vance is right that our institutions have become compromised and have brought our society to the verge of ruin. Indeed, this fact is the whole basis of post-liberalism, but this was done intentionally by groups subversive to the United States. It started with Antonio Gramsci’s call for a “long walk through the institutions,” and culminated with Chinese and Qatari funding of our universities. We have allowed our enemies to “teach” generations of Americans to hate America, and, now that some of them are in political office, actively work to destroy our nation. Add to that what I call “Long-Tail Activism,” and you have a recipe for civilizational collapse. 

The solution in some cases is to fix the institutions. In other cases, it is to throw them out and build new ones.

What I would tell Vance, and other post-liberals, is that individualism did not tear the social contract up. Intersectionality and post-modernism did that—and those are not a part of the conservative movement. This happened as soon as intersectional groups centered around sin moved from “My sin should be legal,” to “You have no right to classify what I am doing as sin. If you don’t like it, you are the sinner. I demand that you accept my sin as virtuous.”

This is the oldest lie of all: the serpent did not just tell Eve that the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would not kill her. Eating that fruit was, at the time, the only sin available to Eve—the serpent told Eve that committing that sin would make her closer to God and would, in fact, make her like God.

The oldest lie is that sin is good.

Vance has cited St. Augustine as an important influence and has said Catholic social teaching helped shape his understanding of what an optimal state should look like. Catholic social thought gives him a vocabulary of duties, subsidiarity, solidarity, family, community, moral order, and the “common good” that is fundamentally different from the language of individual autonomy and laissez-faire economics.

This is why describing Vance simply as being “farther right” than a Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, or even Thomas Massie is false. On economics, individualism, and the proper purposes of political power, Vance has not continued traveling farther along the traditional American conservative road. He has taken a fork into a completely different direction, and one that is in many ways heading back toward the political left. His post-liberalism rejects both the libertarian assumption that individuals should generally be left to order their own lives and the free-market assumption that economic outcomes should generally be left to voluntary exchange.

When Ben Shapiro says that the true political spectrum is like a fishhook or a horseshoe, he is referring to the way people like J. D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes seem to hook back toward the political left. He’s not imagining that, but he is mistaken to lump such people in with the political right. They are very much an alternative to it, relating to the political right only in that they hope to gain our support.

We should not give that to them.

America, in Vance’s telling, has lost family stability, religious belief, cultural confidence, national solidarity, and the moral framework necessary to sustain these things. Government, according to Vance, cannot sit back and just hope those things return. Political and economic power must instead be used to help recreate the conditions in which the preferred culture can flourish, and, to the degree that this is incompatible with personal liberty, personal liberty should not exist.

This is where Vance’s similarity to other versions of the alternative right becomes evident. Richard Spencer also rejects individualism and free-market capitalism. Spencer also believes America has lost a coherent national identity and that the economy should serve a larger national project. The difference is the identity around which that project is organized. Spencer focuses on race. Vance focuses on Christianity, with Catholicism as the philosophical framework through which Christianity is understood.

And Nick Fuentes is the bridge connecting Spencer and Vance, with a focus on both Catholicism and race.

None of this is traditional American conservatism. It is an alternative to it, and one that is in many ways very much the opposite of actual American conservatism.

To the degree that J. D. Vance represents the future of the Republican Party, the Spectator may have a point that libertarianism is dead, but I don’t think that’s the case. I, in fact, gave a speech to the Libertarian Party of Oakland County, Michigan, a number of years ago, in which I argued that, while only about 22% of the population identifies as “libertarian,” when asked a series of questions on political views, the number of people who broadly subscribe to libertarian beliefs can run as high as 60%. I told them that if they really want to move the needle, they need to abandon running as a Libertarian Party, and need to instead help push the conservative movement into a more libertarian-leaning direction. The problem with the Libertarian Party is that every member believes themself to be the only “true libertarian.” As such, they never even back their own candidates.

I was not invited back, but nor was I wrong. Ron Paul proved it by building a powerful movement within the Republican Party. Ron Paul—regardless of his views, including anti-Jewish ones—did more over the two presidential elections he ran as a Republican than the entire Libertarian Party has done over its entire lifetime, including when he ran under their banner.

Libertarianism as a word may be dead, but, as a belief structure, it is still alive and well. We conservatives need to stand firm to it as classical liberals, opposing tyranny in all forms, even when dressed in conservative garb.

If we vote for someone who talks the talk on social issues, but who wants to radically expand the power of the state, we will run headlong into Shapiro’s fish hook, but it won’t be a new political model. It will be a literal fish hook connected to a literal fishing pole, and it will be stuck through our collective mouths.

The best way not to get reeled in is not to get hooked in the first place. I reject the alt-right, and I reject those in it.

I reject J. D. Vance.

And J. D., If you read this, I am open to seeing you repent. It is not too late to embrace actual conservatism again. You are a Marine after all, as am I, and our motto is Semper fidelis, or “Always faithful.”

The question for you seems to be, “Faithful to what?”

School officials in Newton, Massachusetts, who recently gave a teaching job to Maryam Abu-Hasaballah—a cheerleader for the post-October 7 campaign to disrupt Jewish life on college campuses in the United States—do not have a monopoly on questionable hiring decisions. 

For more than two years, school officials in the neighboring city of Boston have employed True-See Allah, who left his job as a community outreach director for Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden in early 2024. Allah left his job after Fox News reporter Kassy Akiva (then Dillon) documented anti-Semitic remarks he made during an interview with a leader of the local Nation of Islam (NOI) mosque.

In a 2016 interview with NOI minister Don Muhammad, Allah spoke of working at a retail store owned by “a Jewish guy that’s got short arms and deep pockets,” Akiva reported in June of 2023.

Another factor contributing to Allah’s departure from his post at District Attorney Hayden’s office was public expressions of support for Louis Farrakhan, an inveterate anti-white racist and anti-Semite who, according to the ADL, described white people as being “born with lie and murder in their nature” and has declared Jews the “enemies” of God. Such expressions of hostility didn’t stop Allah from describing Farrakhan as an “illustrious leader, teacher and guide,” “the embodiment of righteous conduct,” and “the undisputed champion of all humanity.” It took a while, but Allah left his post in the DA’s office in February of 2024.

Allah landed on his feet, however. According to his LinkedIn page, Allah has worked as a “Violence, Intervention, Prevention & Restorative Specialist” for Boston Public Schools (BPS) since June of 2024. A list of city employee salaries confirms his presence on the municipal payroll.

No one wants to discuss Allah’s presence on the city’s payroll or provide details about what he does at BPS. Emails sent to the Boston School Department, the School Committee, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, and the Boston City Council have been ignored. In addition to working for Boston Public Schools, Allah served as a policy advisor for Linda Champion’s failed effort to oust Kevin Hayden as Suffolk County District Attorney. (Champion did not respond to a request for comment.)

BPS’s decision to hire Allah despite his hostile comments is—pardon the malapropism—the second second chance he has been accorded. In 2015, the Massachusetts Governor’s Council voted 7–1 to approve a pardon recommended by Governor Deval Patrick for his role in a gang-related shooting in 1989 that left its victim paralyzed for several years before he died from his wounds. 

Two Boston police superintendents, Daniel Linskey and Paul Joyce, and Daniel F. Conley, Hayden’s predecessor as Suffolk County district attorney, supported the campaign to pardon Allah. Allah told the Boston Globe he sought the pardon, which he received in 2015, to be eligible for a wider range of law enforcement jobs.

Allah has spent much of his adult life on the public payroll. Between 2013 and 2020, he was a prominent staffer in the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, leaving the agency after rising to assistant deputy superintendent. From 2020 to 2022, he worked at Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Public Safety and Security as director of re-entry, overseeing efforts to help former inmates adjust to life outside of prison.

From there, he went to the DA’s office and then to his current post with Boston Public Schools. The upshot is this: True-See Allah, a man with a history of supporting Louis Farrakhan, one of America’s most inveterate racists and bigots, displayed extraordinary ingratitude toward the officials who lobbied for his pardon, and who himself has espoused anti-Semitic comments, is now working for Boston Public Schools (BPS) in a position that no one will describe. If Allah has repudiated his previous anti-Semitism and support for Farrakhan, no one is saying so.

This isn’t the first time BPS has had an extremist on the payroll. Nino Brown, a spokesperson for Kazi Toure, a leader of the Jericho Movement—a black racist organization which advocates for so-called “political prisoners,” with proud cop killers like Mumia Abu-Jamal leading the list—worked as a fifth-grade teacher in Dorchester a few years back. 

Speaking on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse in July of 2020, Brown called for the dissolution of the United States and described Israel as a “parasitic” state. He led the crowd with chants of “Fuck your police state! America was never great!”

“We have to be clear, this social experiment called the United States of America has failed,” Brown said.

The spectacle prompted me to write at the time that Boston Public Schools had “a teacher on the payroll who hates the United States and Israel” and who moonlighted “as a spokesperson for a convicted terrorist who promotes the dissolution of the American republic.” 

After negative coverage of his antics, Brown left Boston for Chicago, where he became active with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Marxist-Leninist party describing itself as working toward socialist revolution and the overthrow of capitalism.

No one in their right mind would hire an open supporter of the Ku Klux Klan to work in an educational setting, but school administrators in eastern Massachusetts have done essentially the same thing—numerous times—over the past few years. Newton school officials hired Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, who downplayed Hamas’s violence on October 7. And prior to that, BPS employed Nino Brown, who called for the dissolution of the U.S. republic. More recently, it hired True-See Allah, a man who lost his previous job in law enforcement after expressing contempt for a Jewish businessman and praising Louis Farrakhan, a notorious anti-Semite and black supremacist in his own right.

What’s going on in Massachusetts? When will the madness end?

There has been much recent talk about the total impermeability of the radical anti-Israel movement to logical thought and factual discourse in relation to the Jewish State as well as to Jews themselves. Indeed, a plethora of ideas have been promoted touching on everything from social psychology to political ideology in an attempt to uncover the roots of this growing problem. However, it can be argued that all of these noble efforts have failed because the source lies outside the quotidian parameters of rational thought, resting instead in the twilight world of myth.

To understand this descent into the irrational, one must look to the French political theorist Georges Sorel and his seminal 1908 work, Reflections on Violence. Sorel posited that mass movements are rarely galvanized by reasoned policy, economic calculations, or verifiable historical timelines. Instead, the masses are swept up by what he termed a “social myth”—a grand, emotionally charged, and unalterable vision of total battle that completely polarizes the world into absolute good versus absolute evil. As Sorel presciently observed, “A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement” (Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings, pp. 28–29).

For the Sorelian disciple, the myth cannot be refuted by factual evidence because it does not operate as an intellectual position; it functions as a secularized religious conviction. The “Palestine First” fanaticism observed across Western institutions today is not a movement seeking pragmatic territorial compromise or diplomatic nuance. It is the modern manifestation of Sorel’s myth, where the act of revolutionary disruption becomes an end in itself, rendering its adherents entirely immune to the parameters of reason.

While Sorel explicitly conceived the “social myth” as a structural engine for proletarian revolt, its contemporary manifestation has undergone a critical mutation. The modern anti-Israel vanguard has decoupled these mechanics from materialist class warfare, translating them into a supreme secular myth. By doing so, they have weaponized Sorel’s revolutionary physics to fill a metaphysical void, operating with the dogmatic, liturgical fervor of a historic theology—but entirely stripped of God.

The Sorelian myth was expressly conceived as a tool for direct action to destroy what the French thinker considered the corrupt parliamentary system of the Third Republic—a means of coalescing a revolutionary cadre among the working-class elites. Sorel’s belief that direct, violent action could shatter a decaying bourgeois society and rejuvenate the nation, as well as his rejection of democratic compromise to justify destroying parliamentary democracy, find a strong echo in the platform of many contemporary radicals. He explicitly argued that the social myth acts to isolate the revolutionary cadre from the rest of society, making it completely unyielding to the compromises of parliamentary diplomacy.

Indeed, violence itself was sacralized as a means of regenerating the body politic through the elimination of its rotten elements via class warfare. He argued that violent struggle restores heroism and virtue to society, saving it from the corruption of compromise and soft moderation. As Sorel wrote, “Proletarian violence not only ensures the future revolution, but it also seems to be the only means by which European nations, stupefied by humanitarianism, can recover their former energy” (p. 77).

Like many of today’s radicals, Sorel separated the revolutionary violence of the working class from the institutional force used by governments and politicians to maintain order. Unlike orthodox Marxists who demanded adherence to strict historical determinism, Sorel championed the pure, unpredictable physics of the clash itself. It should come as no surprise that his ideas exercised a strong influence on Benito Mussolini, himself a former anarchist and socialist respectively, who famously declared, “What I am, I owe to Sorel.”

“Palestine” is the fully crystallized realization of the modern Sorelian political myth—an ahistorical nation whose liberation from the “perfidious Jews” serves as the galvanizing force for society’s malcontents. Isolating, abusing, and even killing the former are purification rituals in the drama of societal redemption in the minds of the true believers. The myth itself is self-contained and not open to criticism or contradiction. Attempts by Jews and others at parrying this tale by referring to “Jewish indigeneity” or “Zionism as a de-colonial movement” are thus an exercise in futility.

To understand how this myth achieved such dominance, one must examine its symbiotic relationship with the academic industry of “de-colonial theory.” In the hands of contemporary campus radicals, de-colonization is no longer treated as a historical, mid-twentieth-century process of administrative withdrawal or institutional transition. Instead, it has been elevated into a supreme Sorelian abstraction. De-coloniality functions as an absolute metaphysical cleansing agent, a theoretical license that divides the globe into static zones of pristine victimhood and irredeemable criminality.

This theoretical machinery transforms complex geopolitical realities into a binary morality play. Consider the boilerplate language found in the immediate post-October 7 statements issued by various Harvard undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committees or Columbia University’s Student Coalition for Justice in Palestine. These communiqués did not analyze the strategic or humanitarian calculus of the geopolitical situation; they asserted a metaphysical axiom. By declaring that the actions of Hamas were an “inevitable consequence of apartheid” and that the responsibility lay “entirely with the Israeli regime,” these student vanguards demonstrated a textbook Sorelian immunity to empirical tragedy. The immediate rush to sanitize atrocities as “resistance” reveals that the modern radical values the violent rupture not as a tragic means to a diplomatic end, but as a celebratory, purifying act of cosmic justice.

By stripping history of its intricate geopolitical friction, the de-colonial framework provides the modern radical with a pseudo-intellectual dispensation. Under this lens, the savage atrocities of October 7 are not evaluated as war crimes or strategic catastrophes; they are celebrated as the pure, unmediated physics of Sorelian direct action. The theory actively sanitizes violence by framing it as a clinical necessity for historical equilibrium. Consequently, the radical cohort is granted total moral immunity, enabling them to view the physical harassment and systematic exclusion of Jewish peers not as bigotry, but as the mandatory, painful friction of a grand historical correction. According to Sorel, proletarian violence “is a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of the class war” (p. 115).

This structural immunity to reason highlights the deep, often unacknowledged genealogical link between the modern radical left and the foundational mechanics of twentieth-century fascism. When Mussolini famously credited Sorel for his political awakening, he was recognizing a fundamental truth about mass psychology: that the ultimate political currency is not the cold rationality of materialist economics, but the intoxicating aesthetic of collective struggle.

The physical manifestation of this aesthetic became obvious in the coordinated campus encampments that swept Western universities. The encampment operates as a physical microcosm of Sorel’s autonomous revolutionary cadre—a literal liberated zone insulated from the laws and norms of the surrounding bourgeois institution. Within these barricades, the enforcement of ideological conformity, the ritualized chanting of absolute slogans like “From the river to the sea,” and the physical exclusion of the uninitiated are not viewed by the participants as totalitarian behavior. Rather, they are experienced as a form of sublime spiritual awakening. The absolute nature of the myth demands absolute space, free from the contaminating influence of external critique or institutional neutrality.

Orthodox Marxism faltered because its strict reliance on historical determinism and economic data required a patient submission to historical phases. Sorel shattered this paradigm by prioritizing the volcanic energy of the myth over the tedious calculations of the bureaucrat. Today’s campus radicals, despite being wrapped in the progressive lexicon of liberation and equity, are the direct psychological descendants of this Sorelian synthesis. They share an identical totalitarian contempt for liberal democratic compromise, institutional neutrality, and parliamentary patience. For both the mid-century fascist and the contemporary academic vanguard, the preservation of institutional stability is viewed as a form of moral decay. As Sorel stated, “The sublime is dead in the bourgeoisie and it is doomed to possess no ethic in the future… They are always ready to accept any compromise, to satisfy the demands of the crowd, provided only that they are not driven to extremities” (p. 229).

Ultimately, the contemporary crusade against the Jewish State cannot be dismantled by the traditional tools of academic debate or diplomatic compromise, for it does not exist within the realm of rational geopolitics. As Georges Sorel presciently demonstrated over a century ago, a social myth operates as an emotional monolith, entirely insulated from the corrosive influence of factual intervention. The slogans, iconography, and institutional dogmatism observed across the West today are not the products of a reasoned political movement; they are the liturgical expressions of a secularized religious fervor that values revolutionary disruption as an end in itself. To counter this growing tide,Western defenders of reason must stop treating the movement as a misinformed political debate that can be corrected with data. Instead, it must be recognized for what it truly is: a powerful, irrational Sorelian myth that threatens to dismantle the very foundations of objective truth and institutional stability.

What thirty years of living with PTSD have taught me about the generation coming home from October 7.

There are things I know about the young soldiers coming home from this war that I wish I did not know.

I know that coming home is not the same as returning.

I know that a body can leave a battlefield years before the battlefield leaves the body.

I know that you can sleep beside the person you love and still spend the night somewhere else entirely. 

That a smell can become a time machine. That a motorcycle backfiring on an ordinary street can make the body respond to a war the mind knows ended decades ago.

And I know that sometimes the worst day of a war happens long after the shooting stops.

I was 18 when I became a soldier. I served in an elite combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces. 

More than thirty years later, I am still, in certain ways, serving there.

The uniform is gone. The young man who wore it is gone. I became a husband, a father, a writer. I studied psychology. I built a life. But trauma is unimpressed by chronology. It does not care that you have moved on. It has its own calendar.

For many years, I thought the defining word in post-traumatic stress disorder was trauma.

I was wrong.

I have begun to think the defining word may be post.

The word is so small we barely notice it.

Post.

After.

It contains a promise: Whatever happened, happened before. The danger has passed. The battle is over. 

You survived it. Now begins the difficult business of living afterward.

People with PTSD know how unreliable that promise can be. The event ends, but some part of the nervous system fails to receive the news. Yesterday continues to invade today. The body keeps watch over a border that no longer exists.

Still, there is a border.

There is a before, an event, and an after.

October 7, 2023, and the war that followed have made me wonder what happens when even that border disappears.

What happens when there is no post?

For many Israelis, there has been no clean aftermath. A reservist comes home from Gaza and is called back. A family begins to breathe and another siren sounds. A soldier attends the funeral of a friend, sleeps in his own bed, eats breakfast with his children, then puts the uniform back on.

The front and the home front have bled into one another.

This matters psychologically. Trauma has traditionally been understood as something that happens to us. 

Then comes the attempt to process what happened.

But what if the processing must begin while the happening continues?

Researchers studying Israelis after October 7 have begun using language that captures this strange condition. A 2026 prospective study following Israeli adults for 27 months described the period as one of “ongoing collective trauma.” Probable PTSD rose sharply after October 7 and later declined, but remained elevated for a significant part of the population.

The study also found something important and hopeful: psychological distress and post-traumatic growth can exist at the same time. Human beings are not merely repositories for damage.

But I am interested in another possibility.

What if what we are witnessing is not only collective trauma, but cumulative trauma?

Not one wound shared by millions.

Millions of different wounds, arriving before the previous ones have had time to scar.

Israel did not enter October 7 psychologically empty.

No society ever enters history empty.

We arrived carrying previous wars, previous terrorist attacks, previous losses. Families carried memories of the Holocaust, persecution, and displacement. Veterans carried Lebanon, Gaza, the Yom Kippur War, the first and second intifadas, and operations whose names have faded from the news but not necessarily from the people who fought in them.

Then October 7 arrived.

And something collided.

A grandfather who survived one history watches his grandson enter another.

A father who never speaks about his war recognizes something in the eyes of his son returning from this one.

A child learns to distinguish the sound of an interception from an impact before learning things a child should know first.

A wife discovers that the husband who came home is home and not home.

None of these experiences is identical. We should resist the temptation to flatten them into a single national diagnosis. Grief is not PTSD. Fear is not PTSD. Being Jewish in New York after October 7 is not the same experience as surviving the Nova festival, being kidnapped from a kibbutz, losing a child, or fighting for months in Gaza.

Pain does not become more meaningful by pretending all pain is equal.

But different traumas can still speak to one another.

And sometimes they wake one another up.

A nationwide longitudinal study of Israeli Jewish adults conducted before and after October 7 found that previous trauma mattered to subsequent PTSD trajectories. Another continuing national survey found that prior trauma was among the factors associated with crossing clinical thresholds for depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress during the war.

This is one of trauma’s crueler qualities.

The past does not always remain in the past waiting politely for us to deal with the present.

Sometimes the present knocks on its door.

I have spent more than thirty years learning this.

PTSD does not always arrive carrying a sign with its name on it.

Sometimes it arrives disguised as anger.

Sometimes as insomnia.

Sometimes as addiction.

Sometimes as a marriage slowly learning to organize itself around one person’s invisible land mines.

Sometimes it is a father sitting at the dinner table who cannot explain why he needs to face the door.

Sometimes it is silence.

And sometimes, for a long time, it looks remarkably like functioning.

That is why I become uneasy when we try to count the psychologically wounded of this war.

We should count them. We must.

But we should also understand what the numbers cannot yet contain.

In July 2026, Israel’s Ministry of Defense reported that approximately 26,200 wounded members of the military and security forces from the current war were being treated by its Rehabilitation Department. 

About 65 percent were seeking help for psychological distress, including PTSD, anxiety, adjustment difficulties, and depression. The ministry warned that, without major changes, the national rehabilitation system could be overwhelmed.

Those numbers are enormous.

They may also be early.

A national survey published in 2026 found that 35 percent of Israeli adults surveyed reported feeling a need for mental health treatment since the war began. Only 13 percent reported having received some form of treatment. Twenty percent felt they needed help but did not seek it, while another two percent sought care but had not received it or were still waiting. 

Accessibility, including cost, distance, and waiting times, were among the major barriers.

There is another number I find difficult to look at.

In 2025, 22 serving IDF soldiers died by suicide, according to figures presented to a Knesset subcommittee. Between January 2024 and July 2025, 279 suicide attempts were recorded among soldiers. These figures must be handled carefully. Suicide has multiple causes, and wartime changes in the size and composition of the serving population, particularly the massive mobilization of reservists, complicate comparisons with earlier years. They cannot simply be translated into a PTSD statistic.

But neither should they be ignored.

Perhaps the most disturbing figure is one that does not exist.

How many people are walking around Israel today carrying an injury that has not yet introduced itself?

I think about this as a father as much as I do as a man with PTSD.

My generation knew war. The generation before mine knew war. In Israel, this sentence has become so ordinary that we rarely stop to hear what it means.

Trauma can travel through families without anyone formally handing it down.

Children learn the weather inside their parents.

They learn which subjects change the temperature in a room. They learn which noises make their father turn his head. They learn when their mother is listening to them and when part of her attention is somewhere else. They learn that there are questions one does not ask.

And now another generation is coming home.

Except many of them are not exactly coming home.

They are moving back and forth between war and ordinary life, between uniforms and children’s bedrooms, between funerals and supermarkets.

We ask extraordinary things of them.

Fight.

Come home.

Be a father.

Go back.

Come home.

Sleep.

Function.

Love.

Go back.

Then one day, presumably, we will tell them it is over.

I wonder whether their bodies will believe us.

There is a danger in writing about a society this way. It is possible to make trauma sound inevitable, as though an entire generation has already been sentenced to PTSD.

It has not.

Most people exposed to trauma do not necessarily develop chronic PTSD. One longitudinal study following 1,231 Israeli Jewish adults identified resilience as by far the largest trajectory in its sample. The 27-month study likewise found substantial reductions in depression and anxiety from their immediate post-October 7 peaks, alongside increasing post-traumatic growth.

That matters.

Resilience is real.

So is recovery.

So is love.

So is the astonishing human capacity to rebuild a life around something that once seemed certain to destroy it.

I know this too.

I wrote novels. I raised children. I loved my wife. I laughed. I worked. I traveled. I sat with friends. I experienced beauty. PTSD did not take possession of every room in my life.

But resilience is not the same as invulnerability.

And praising a society for its resilience can become dangerous if resilience becomes an excuse not to care for its wounds.

The question, then, is not whether Israel will survive psychologically.

Societies survive terrible things.

The question is what survival will cost, who will pay that cost privately, and whether we are building a mental health system capable of finding people before their suffering becomes the organizing principle of their lives.

Because the challenge may not be a single wave of PTSD arriving after the war.

There may be no wave.

There may be tides.

People who need help now.

People who will collapse when their reserve duty ends.

People who will function beautifully for five years.

People whose marriages will notice before they do.

People whose children will notice before their doctors do.

People who will never call what happened to them trauma because someone else had it worse.

People who are not yet hurting.

For most of my life, I wanted distance from the young soldier I once was.

Today I sometimes wish I could speak to him.

Not to warn him. It is too late for that.

I would tell him something much simpler.

When you come home, do not be ashamed if some part of you does not.

And perhaps that is what I want to say now to the soldiers returning from this war, to the survivors of October 7, to the bereaved, to families who have lived for years between hope and catastrophe, and, in a different way, to Jewish communities around the world that discovered after October 7 that history can suddenly feel much closer than geography suggests.

Do not assume that because you are standing, you are uninjured.

Do not assume that because you are functioning, you are fine.

And do not wait for suffering to become unbearable before granting it the dignity of a name.

I have lived with PTSD for more than thirty years.

I know its tricks.

I know how yesterday can enter a room before you do. I know that a war can end on a map and continue for decades inside a body.

But my war ended.

However imperfectly, however painfully, I was eventually given an after.

That is what frightens me about this generation.

We are counting the wounded now because counting gives us the comforting impression that the wound already has edges.

It does not.

Some wounds announce themselves immediately.

Some wait for silence.

Some wait for safety.

Some wait until everyone else has stopped asking how you are.

The war will end. I have to believe that.

And when it does, another clock will begin.

The one I have been living by for more than thirty years.

The post.

And only then may we begin to understand how many people came home carrying a war that did not.

I don’t remember the first book I ever read, but the first book that truly moved me was The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. I read it when I was 10, I think, and I remember being profoundly sad as I finished the last page that I had lost a friend.

My mother told me that there were three more books—the Lord of the Rings trilogy—but I quickly learned that Bilbo was only a passing character in them, so I had to grieve for the loss of my friend even as I met new friends including Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo. I was then saddened about a year later when I finished The Return of the King, and though I, of course, read The Silmarillion immediately thereafter, it only gave me details about the Tolkien universe. It did not bring back any of my friends.

As an adult I continue to read a great deal, but very little fiction. I prefer history, economics, and other forms of non-fiction, and recently finished Their Finest Hour, the second volume of Winston Churchill’s six-volume work covering World War II.

Only two books have ever reached me the way J. R. R. Tolkien did: The Godfather, which I read about a year ago, and Moby-Dick, which I read about 10 years ago. I had a similar feeling of loss when I finished The Godfather, which was not eased much by The Sicilian, also about Michael Corleone, and also by Mario Puzo.

The Sicilian was a good book, but a very different book than The Godfather. I did not find the Michael Corleone in The Sicilian to be the same character.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, was interesting as it was actually two separate books, compiled together under the same cover. One was the story of Ahab’s hunt for the White Whale that stole his leg, as told through the lens of Ishmael, a sailor on Ahab’s ship. The other was an instruction manual on whaling, and though both books were woven together into the same novel, the transitions between story and instruction manual were stark. It really did read like two separate books between which the reader was forced to switch back and forth. You would read a chapter in which Ishmael uses a harpoon, for example, and it would be followed by a chapter on how harpoons are built.

There is another series of books that have to be mentioned before I can describe J. D. Vance’s latest work, Communion.I have to mention Arthur Conan Doyle’s works on Sherlock Holmes.

The interesting thing about the Sherlock Holmes books is that Sherlock Holmes is not somebody to whom anyone can relate. He is brilliant, but cold. His sense of humor is often cruel, and he has an arrogance that makes him remarkably difficult to like. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew this, of course, which is why he told the stories of Sherlock Holmes through someone far more relatable, and far more likeable: Dr. John Watson. I would imagine that if I read all of Doyle’s works, I would have a similar sense of loss that I had when finishing The Lord of the Rings, except that it would not be Sherlock Holmes that I missed so much as it would be Watson.

Like Moby-Dick, Communion is not entirely what it presents itself to be. It is written as a kind of second memoir (after Hillbilly Elegy), but it is really a political justification, disguised as a Catholic apologetic, disguised as a memoir. In this way, it is reminiscent of Moby-Dick, although J. D. Vance is far less jarring in his transitions between intentions than was Herman Melville.

Like all the books on Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist in Communion is far too arrogant and far too perfect for anybody to relate to him. Also like Holmes, the book looks at the main character through the eyes of someone who is infinitely more likeable, but instead of a doctor-friend of the main character, we get Vance’s grandmother, Mamaw.

Mamaw is a likeable character to whom we can warm. J. D. Vance is not.

I should also be more accurate. Vance does not present himself as perfect in Communion. Far from it. He actually presents an extensive catalog of his shortcomings. The problem is that none of the shortcomings ultimately cost Vance anything via his narrative. Every flaw becomes evidence of growth, and every failure becomes something he somehow managed to overcome. His self-criticism becomes a kind of prolonged self-congratulation.

Also, Communion is the first book to which I have listened rather than read. I downloaded the audio version and listened to it on my wife’s Audible account, and I’m glad I did, as it gave me more insight about the book than reading it would have done. Vance narrated it himself, but he did not sound like he was reading something he had written, or even something to which he related. He sounded, rather, like someone reading a book with which he was unfamiliar.

That is not an accusation; I am not accusing Vance of using a ghostwriter. What I am saying is that his prose is direct and conversational, but surprisingly sterile and likely impossible to read from within, even by its own author. The book, like the author, is performative.

When I read Churchill, I feel like he is in my head. Churchill wrote exactly as he spoke, and, when you read him, you can literally hear him speaking. With J. D. Vance, you don’t hear him even when you are listening to him reading his own work. I found that to be very strange. It is almost as if the Vance in the book is a person completely different from the Vance in the recording studio.

But then the book was not really written as a memoir, and it was not really about J. D. Vance, except as experienced through the eyes of his grandmother. Even after she died in the book, he continues to use her as a literary device, telling us what she would have said about different situations, were she still alive. Just as Dr. Watson tells us about Holmes, Vance tells us about Mamaw telling us about Vance. And that was a wise choice: Mamaw is what makes the Vance character work. Without Mamaw, we would be left with just J. D. Vance, which would work about as well as Sherlock Holmes without Watson.

Vance is very willing to criticize himself, but his failures have a strange quality to them. They are rarely just failures. They are almost always evidence of something admirable that Vance took too far, or something Vance was eventually wise enough to overcome. Vance tells us, for example, that his desire for stability eventually became a “craving for conquest.” He became too ambitious, wanting to win for the sake of winning. He became too focused on worldly success, and eventually discovered that worldly success was not enough.

There is certainly self-criticism in that, but to become disillusioned with extraordinary success, one must first become extraordinarily successful. Vance’s ambition was a problem because he was so ambitious. His obsession with achievement was a problem only because he achieved so much. His pursuit of money and prestige was a problem because he acquired money and prestige and discovered that neither fulfilled him.

Even when Vance is wrong, the error somehow reflects well on Vance.

Perhaps the best example comes when he discusses his infamous remark about the Democratic Party being run by “childless cat ladies.” Vance calls it one of the dumbest things he ever said and describes it as a “boneheaded comment.” Fair enough. But he then describes the comment as “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

Even the apology contains a victory lap.

Yes, Vance tells us, he was wrong, but he was always successfully wrong.

That does not mean the personal growth Vance describes is false. I have no reason to believe it is. It means that Communion is constructed in such a way that virtually every road eventually leads back to the growth, insight, achievement, or wisdom of J. D. Vance. Like the Vampire Lestat, as told in the works of Anne Rice, J. D. Vance keeps becoming more powerful.

That pattern becomes more important when Vance begins discussing his conversion to Catholicism. In some ways, Communion is a Catholic apologetic. The problem is that it is not a particularly effective one, as Vance never establishes why Catholicism may be true. He only establishes why Catholicism became compelling to J. D. Vance. He then assumes that if it is good enough for him, it is good enough for everyone.

Elementary, my dear Watson!

This is actually the undercurrent of the entire book. Vance writes as a memoir to explain why he decided to be Catholic, and then he applies his personal journey as a political mission, assuming that anything he found beneficial in his life should be replicated in policy for the rest of us.

Vance’s movement away from atheism was not initially driven by some great theological revelation. Peter Thiel played an important role as an extremely intelligent man who was also openly Christian, and Vance had constructed a worldview in which intelligent people were atheists and religious people were not. Thiel didn’t fit into that, but nothing Thiel said is singled out as particularly relevant. It was just that someone intelligent believed. Later, while visiting a cathedral in France with his wife and son, Vance described experiencing “a distinct sense of belonging and presence.” Private instruction with Dominican priests followed, and Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2019.

All of that explains Vance’s conversion, but it does not prove Catholicism.

Vance does not spend much time establishing why Catholicism may be more correct than Protestantism based on Scripture. He does not systematically work through competing Catholic and Protestant understandings of ecclesiastical authority, salvation, the sacraments, or apostolic succession. In fact, he often uses the broader word “Christian” where one might expect a Catholic convert writing a Catholic conversion story to use “Catholic,” and he gives the Protestant churches of his youth real credit for laying part of the foundation upon which his later faith was built. This makes Communion an unusual apologetic.

The closest he comes to saying that Catholicism is better than other forms of Christianity is in saying that it is older and more structured, and even that is not entirely true. It is, of course, the oldest of the Christian traditions, but anyone who thinks it is the most structured has never experienced the Dutch Reformed church that turned my mother against God.

Vance’s argument is not so much, “Catholicism is true, and here is why,” as it is, “Catholicism made sense of my life in ways the alternatives did not.”

That is a perfectly legitimate reason to write a memoir about becoming Catholic. It is considerably less useful as an argument for why anyone else should become Catholic. And this is where what might otherwise be a literary criticism of Vance’s ego becomes important to the rest of the book.

Vance repeatedly has difficulty distinguishing between what his personal experience establishes for J. D. Vance and what it establishes for everyone else. Were Vance just an author, this would not be as much of a problem, but Vance is also the vice president on the eve of campaign season.

Catholicism gave Vance something he believed he had lost. He had spent years understanding his childhood through sociology and statistics. Poverty, addiction, family instability, and trauma could be understood as forces that produced predictable outcomes, and Vance found that explanation debilitating. Catholic teaching on sin and grace offered him something different. Circumstances mattered, but he was more than the product of those circumstances. He remained, as one review of the book summarized his understanding, “a soul with agency.”

I actually find that part of Vance’s conversion compelling. People have agency. I’ve written about that a fair amount myself. But while Vance uses agency when talking about himself, when he extends his personal understandings into the political world and discusses what kind of society he would make society based on his personal understandings, he begins to take that agency away from other people.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “Catholicism taught me how I should live,” and saying, “Catholicism taught me how everyone should live.” There is an even bigger difference between saying, “Catholicism taught me how people should live,” and saying, “Government should structure society to encourage people to live that way.”

Communion crosses all three lines.

Vance specifically rejects classical liberalism and its focus on individualism—not atomized, nihilistic, all-night raver “me-ism,” but its understanding of individuals as responsible, dignified, unique people whom the state does not have the right to oppress for any reason. His Catholicism increasingly becomes a framework through which government can judge whether the rest of us are ordering our own lives correctly.

That brings us to economics. J. D. Vance hates economics, and is very clear about that in his book.

Vance is right about something important: GDP is not a measurement of human flourishing. Of course it isn’t. GDP measures economic production. It does not measure whether you love your wife, whether your children respect you, whether you have meaningful friendships, whether you go to church, or whether you will die believing you lived a worthwhile life. Economics has nothing to do with answering those questions—as if it weren’t a strawman argument to imply that Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher ever said it did—and Vance repeatedly treats economic considerations as though they are a competing moral philosophy.

Economics is nothing of the sort. When a husband and wife sit at the kitchen table and decide whether they can afford another child, they are not worshipping GDP. They are looking at their expenses, such as their mortgage, the cost of childcare, groceries, healthcare, their incomes, and whether one of them can afford to stop working.

Those are not ideological abstractions. They are constraints. This distinction matters enormously because Vance’s solution is not to tell people that family matters more than money. He increasingly moves toward the position that government should use policy to make particular family choices easier and more attractive.

There is nothing inherently unusual about government policy affecting family decisions. The question is whether the government should decide what behavior it wants. Vance’s answer appears to be yes, whereas classical liberalism would say that such decisions are none of the government’s business. The government exists to protect liberty—it does not exist to control our lives.

Helping a family make the decision it wants to make is fundamentally different from pushing it to make whatever decision Vance wants the family to make and then structuring government policy to encourage that decision, and that is where Vance and I part company. It is also where the irony of his conversion story becomes impossible for me to ignore.

Vance found liberation in the idea that he was not the product of external forces. He takes solace in the knowledge that he was not a statistic or an output, but was, rather, a unique soul with agency. Then he constructs a political morality in which millions of other souls increasingly become outcomes for him to manage.

Once the government is responsible not simply for protecting the conditions under which people pursue what they believe to be good, but also for defining what is good, the relevant question becomes what government believes human beings are for. Vance has an answer for that, and it is substantially Catholic.

Vance makes a particularly telling call-out to Pope Leo XIII’s work, where Catholic social thought bridges between personal morality and political organization to link the individual soul to the overall society. His public arguments around his book have likewise emphasized Christianity’s role in American public life; in a July interview, he described America as, “in a very foundational sense,” a Christian nation. Vance connects secular liberalism to social division.

That is not the same thing as demanding that the United States become a Catholic theocracy, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise. Vance calls for something more subtle. Vance rejects the proposition that government should remain neutral between competing understandings of what constitutes a good life, and once the government has a preferred understanding of what counts as human flourishing, policy becomes the mechanism through which that preference is expressed. That’s kind of like theocracy-lite, or diet theocracy.

And this brings us back to economics.

Morality can tell us which outcomes we consider good. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether a particular policy will actually produce those outcomes. Morality does not expressly deal with cause-and-effect relationships, and it is hard to live a truly moral life unless we know how the things we do will affect other people. This is important for each and every person within the country, and it is vastly more so for someone who wants to be the President of the United States. Vance’s contempt for using economics in decision-making is thus a real problem.

There is another problem with Vance’s economic argument that his own biography makes difficult to ignore: J. D. Vance discovered that money was unimportant only after becoming fabulously wealthy. Vance does not want others to pursue wealth the way he did, but nor has he given his own wealth away. Instead, he says that winning is a futile exercise—while writing this book as a sitting vice president, on the cusp of running for higher office to achieve even more power than he already has, and to “win” another election.

Perhaps he should take his own advice and do something that would be easier on his family. Life in the White House is the opposite of what his book seems to recommend both to himself and the reader, and that is a tension Communion completely ignores.

Vance is not simply telling us that he has learned things. Every memoirist does that. He is gradually asking his personal journey to carry weight that extends into public policy. Vance is saying that because Catholicism worked for him, Catholicism must describe the public good. Vance is saying that because Catholicism taught him how to order his family, Catholicism also tells him how other families should be ordered.

At every stage of Vance’s journey the evidentiary burden grows larger while the underlying evidence remains remarkably personal, and yet Communion stops just before getting to a point where Vance becomes specific about what his political justifications mean in terms of actual policy. That may be the politically shrewdest thing about the book.

The Associated Press described Communion as potentially serving as an “origin story” for a future presidential campaign and as a kind of manifesto about religion’s role in public life. Vance himself, while promoting the book, described it as “way less political than you might think.” The truth is that Vance tells us what government should value without telling us how the government should impose those values. He tells us that liberal neutrality is inadequate without giving us a replacement, and he tells us that the government should care about family formation without defining the limits of government’s authority over the family.

Does Vance want to be the President of the United States, or is he running to be the national Papaw? I don’t ask that rhetorically—Vance’s description of our future directly contradicts the separation of church and state.

There is something almost Aaron Burr-like about J. D. Vance’s book, at least in the popular conception of Burr in the musical Hamilton: “Talk less. Smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for,” as Burr sings. People attracted to Vance’s political justification can imagine whatever political outcomes they prefer, whereas people alarmed by Vance’s direction have no concrete political policies against which to argue. This allows Vance to establish his moral justification for a political program without assuming any responsibility. Something Barack Obama did effortlessly.

And that is why I call Communion a political justification disguised as a memoir, rather than a political manifesto disguised as one. A manifesto would have been more honest.

Vance has argued that modern liberalism inadequately understands human flourishing. He has argued that economic success is not an adequate measure of what constitutes a “good society.” He has presented Christianity, and more specifically his Catholic moral framework, as a better account of what human beings actually need, and he has moved from individual morality toward the proposition that government has a legitimate interest in encouraging the conditions he believes produce flourishing, which is solely based on his limited understanding of what helped him.

Perhaps some of this is unavoidable in a memoir. Every autobiography is an act of selection. Every remembered conversation has to pass through the author’s memory before it reaches the reader, and of course his political views will come out. We also tend to think of ourselves in a generally positive light, and I’ve written most of my own story, which, when published, will probably deserve some of the same criticisms. Vance’s book, however, goes further, asking for his personal growth to serve as evidence for his political judgment, and his personal growth, however real, does not establish the political propositions Vance builds upon it.

It is particularly striking because one of the most important things Vance says Catholicism gave him was the recovery of his own agency. He says he is not just a product of Appalachia, poverty, family instability, Yale, Silicon Valley, or politics, but is, rather, a human being capable of choosing what kind of man he has, and will continue to, become. Unlike J. D. Vance, I believe everyone else deserves the same courtesy.

Mamaw is what makes the Vance character work. Through her eyes, Vance becomes human. She gives the reader someone warm enough, funny enough, flawed enough, and real enough about whom to care. But Mamaw did not write the book, and Mamaw is not asking for our vote. J. D. Vance is.

Let’s be honest: the memoir is but paint. The question Communion leaves unanswered is what Vance intends to build underneath it. 

I finished the book without feeling like I’d lost a friend.

I won’t say Communion is poorly written. It is not. It is, in fact, quite engaging, and if it stopped at the point of saying what worked in J. D. Vance’s life, I would applaud it. Unfortunately, it is not a memoir. It is only disguised as one, and as a political justification, it fails miserably.

Luckily for me, I’ve now finished Communion and can go back to reading Winston Churchill.

For more than a decade, our political debate has been driven by genuine panic. Depending on who is speaking, every election cycle brings warnings of an imminent slide into fascism or communism. These fears are not baseless. When partisans manipulate congressional rules, pack courts, gerrymander districts, and weaponize state agencies, democracy genuinely suffers.

These abuses matter. They act like a chronic illness, slowly draining public trust and trapping politicians in an escalating cycle of rule-bending. We should hold leaders accountable for these illiberal power plays. At the same time, history shows that constitutional republics are remarkably tough. They have absorbed corrupt machines, factional scheming, and dirty legal tricks for centuries without collapsing overnight.

What no society can survive for long, however, is the loss of basic morality.

A system of laws does not produce human decency on its own; laws only work when they sit on an uncompromising moral floor. When that floor rots out, the best-written constitution cannot prevent a rapid descent into violence.

A Slow Grind vs. Acute Poison

Political rule-bending and moral collapse are intimately connected, but their timelines and stakes are entirely asymmetric.

Decades of procedural hardball function like a thousand shallow cuts. Every broken norm feeds partisan paranoia, convincing both sides that the other cannot be trusted to play fair. This slow decay is painful, but it remains a battle over the machinery of state power. Even in fierce partisan combat, opponents still fundamentally recognize each other as citizens.

The acute danger is that this chronic exhaustion leaves the civic body defenseless against a far deadlier pathogen: tribalism that has crossed into eliminationism.

That poison takes hold the moment a culture abandons its taboos against dehumanizing rivals and excusing political violence. When that happens, the debate ceases to be about policy or governance; it becomes an existential threat to human life.

This moral baseline is not arbitrary, nor does it require consensus on religion or personal lifestyle. It is the bedrock and original sequence of liberal democracy itself. The moral claim of the Declaration of Independence—that all individuals possess equal human worth and an unalienable right to life and liberty—preceded the Constitution by more than a decade. The mechanics of government were engineered to protect that truth, not invent it. Applauding the physical destruction of an opponent destroys the very premise that makes self-government possible.

Policing Our Own

This asymmetry between illiberal tactics and moral decay dictates where our civic energy must be spent.

Because safe districts and hyper-partisanship heavily insulate politicians from consequences, demanding unilateral procedural restraint is largely shouting into the wind. In the arena of power politics, it is rarely obvious where self-defense ends and escalation begins.

Yet there is zero ambiguity around the boundary separating political combat from moral depravity.

While dirty political tricks inevitably provoke retaliation, immorality cannot be answered with equal immorality. The moment a culture says, “We can celebrate the murder of our enemies because they celebrated the death of ours,” it has committed moral suicide.

Fortunately, holding that moral line offers a far clearer path to political success than practicing procedural restraint. An official who unilaterally refuses to gerrymander or wield legislative hardball will likely be punished at the ballot box by their own base. But a leader who refuses to compromise basic human decency—who draws an unyielding boundary against eliminationist hate—may trigger anger from a loud fringe, while creating an opportunity to win over a far larger, exhausted majority. That majority, however, will only matter if we actually show up to back them.

Courts can police legal abuses, but basic moral taboos can only be enforced by civil society—by everyday citizens deciding which individuals and organizations they are willing to legitimize. The real crisis today is not simply that cynical politicians peddle eliminationist hatred; it is that their own supporters make excuses for them.

Too many citizens look away when their leaders dehumanize opponents, excusing the rhetoric because they like the candidate’s judges, taxes, or cultural agenda, or simply because they have been trained to vote for one party no matter what. We cannot continue this way. The line has to be drawn at the fundamental moral guardrails of liberal democracy. We must make it unmistakable to any leader: the moment you engage in or sanitize eliminationist hate, you forfeit our vote—no matter what illiberalism you are fighting against.

A bush is burning in the desert. No one knows how long it has been burning, or how long it will continue to burn. No one knows who lit it on fire, or why. 

Tending his flock, a shepherd approaches nervously. Years earlier, he had lived in a palace, surrounded by privilege most people could scarcely imagine. Now, his life could hardly be more different. He is out in the wilderness, far from everything he once knew. 

Perhaps experience has taught him the wisdom of keeping his head down and staying out of other people’s business. Having fled his country after killing a slave master he’d come across beating his charge, he already knows what can happen when you make someone else’s problem your own. He has a family now, responsibilities of his own, a quiet life that asks far less of him than the one he left behind. 

But the burning bush catches his eye. Something about it does not make sense. It burns, yet somehow it is not consumed. Bushes are not supposed to keep burning. For a split second—maybe without even meaning to—he turns toward it.

He could keep walking. He could register the oddity of a bush burning without being consumed and simply return to the flock. Instead, he moves closer.

In a few moments, he will utter a single word that will change his life forever:

Hineni.

Here I am.

*

When we first invited contributors to reflect on their own Hineni moments—those moments when something happening in the world becomes a personal summons, when the distance between a problem and our personal responsibility to solve it collapses and “someone should do something about this” becomes “I guess that someone is going to be me”—we thought we knew what the outcome would look like. We had invited a remarkable group of people of different ages, religions, cultures, and nationalities to tell us about the moment they felt called to act. Some had spent decades advocating, organizing, creating, teaching, or speaking publicly. Others had found themselves thrust into those roles just recently. Some were responding to horrors they had experienced themselves. Others stepped forward in reaction to events taking place across the ocean. What united them was not who they were, but the fact that, when the call came, they chose to answer.

Our goal was simple. We wanted to amplify the voices of people who had stood up in the face of darkness and, each in their own way, brought some light into the world. We wanted to bring their stories together, honor what they had done, and show the extraordinary things ordinary people can do when they decide to make a problem their responsibility.

But as the essays came in, we began to notice something we had not anticipated. Stories that appeared radically different on the surface echoed one another. A childhood memory in Israel spoke to a corporate meeting in London. An Egyptian activist inspired by an American comic book seemed to be describing the same psychological journey as an Israeli artist, an American professor, a Mexican activist, and a Christian family in Britain. Though they had all responded to different calls and had done so in different ways, the paths that led them to act began to look strikingly similar.

We had thought we were assembling an anthology of Hineni moments. What emerged, however, was something much more ambitious: a blueprint for how Hineni moments come into being. Once we realized that such moments can happen to anyone, anywhere, we began looking across the stories for the conditions that make them possible. To our delight, we found that these conditions are ones we can all cultivate within ourselves.

Condition 1: Pay attention. 

Hineni moments do not begin with a solution. They begin with noticing a problem. Sometimes, paying attention means listening to an inner voice, as Yardenne did when she began to suspect that the vulnerability she had spent much of her life trying to overcome might actually be a source of strength. Other times, that attention comes with a jolt, as when a young Leat Corinne Unger felt an instinctive pull toward service while watching tired Israeli soldiers step off a bus. Still other times, it means noticing an absence that others have overlooked, as when Steven Phillips first noticed that Jews in the workplace were missing from conversations about inclusion. 

Some people seem to move through life attuned to every call. Others notice only when something shakes them awake. But whether that recognition is sudden or gradual, what separates those who keep walking from those who stop and take a stand is often not what they see, but whether they choose to look closely. The first step toward saying Hineni is simply refusing to look away.

Condition 2: Know yourself. 

Hineni moments do not create us so much as they reveal us. For historian Gil Troy, it was the sudden realization that it was his turn to step off the beaten path after years of studying the moments when pivotal figures did the same. For writer and editor Elissa Wald, it was hindsight that showed her how the stories of her childhood caretaker, a survivor of Auschwitz, had prepared her for work she could not yet imagine. Yet whether the recognition comes in real time or only years later, what ultimately separates those who answer the call from those who do not is often not what they discover about the world, but what they discover about themselves.

Hineni moments reveal what we truly value when values become costly, whose suffering we allow to interrupt our lives, how broadly we draw the circle of people we consider “us,” and what gifts, convictions, and reserves of courage have been quietly lying in wait inside of us. Sometimes, answering the call transforms us. Just as often, it reveals who we were all along.

Condition 3: Don’t wait until you feel ready.

There is no such thing as a Hineni personality—no particular combination of courage, confidence, charisma, conviction, or experience that predisposes a person to answer the call. Debbie Lechtman disliked the attention her work attracted and went out of her way to remain anonymous, yet eventually found herself speaking publicly on social media to hundreds of thousands of people. Adina Chelminsky intentionally tattooed the word Hineni on her wrist just days after the October 7 massacre as a reminder to never stop wrestling with fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Shabbos Kestenbaum arrived at Harvard Divinity School only to find himself confronting institutions vastly more powerful than he was. 

Their personalities, proclivities, and politics could hardly be more different. Yet together, they reject the comforting myth that the people who stand up are simply born braver and more competent than everyone else. Hineni is not a personality trait. It is a decision. We do not answer the call because we have become that person. We become that person because we answered the call. If we wait until we feel like the kind of person who says Hineni, we may wait forever.

Condition 4: Use what you have.

Hineni moments do not demand that we acquire extraordinary abilities. They simply ask us to use the skills we already possess. When a frightened friend told Eitan Chitayat that she had learned to hide her Jewishness in Paris, he did what great storytellers do: he wrote. When Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid watched helplessly from New York as hostages were brutally dragged into Gaza, they reached for the language they knew best: they made art. When Cochav Elkayam-Levy saw the world denying, dismissing, and distorting evidence of Hamas’s use of sexual violence, she drew on her experience as a legal scholar, feminist, and human-rights advocate to correct the historical record. 

None of them waited to acquire new talents. None of them stopped to wonder whether they had what it takes. They simply answered the call with what they already knew how to do. Each responded differently because each had something different to offer. The question, then, is not whether we have enough. It is whether we are willing to begin with what we already have.

Condition 5: Stand with others, + let them stand with you.

Hineni is spoken in the singular, but it is rarely lived that way. Almost none of the stories in this issue is truly about one person acting alone. Andrew Pessin was close to giving up when a petition supporting him drew more than ten thousand signatures from around the world, reminding him that he was not alone and restoring his determination to keep speaking up. Rosa’s urge to support the families of hostages strengthened her own voice, enabling her to advocate for herself and other survivors of sexual assault. Ramon Maislen moved from private anger into civic action and discovered what becomes possible when neighbors organize together.

Though their stories are very different, they all remind us that we create our communities even as our communities create us. When one person speaks, others realize they are not alone. And when one person acts, action become easier for others to imagine. No one says Hineni alone for very long.

Condition 6: Look beyond yourself, and beyond your own. 

Hineni is a Hebrew word rooted in Jewish scripture, but the human capacity it names is neither bounded by Judaism nor limited to those who practice it. Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian Muslim activist who risked everything to make sure her humanist principles were applied universally, began her journey with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Daphne and Andrew Kirk—devout Christian mother and son who have turned service into a way of life—built their own ethic of Hineni around repeatedly saying “yes” to people in need, regardless of where those people lived or what they believed. Vanessa Hidary, a Jewish spoken-word artist, drew on her family history as a Mizrahi Jew and a moral worldview shaped by struggles for racial justice, women’s rights, and diversity to speak up for her own community when Jews became the targets. 

Though their journeys began in very different places, their stories remind us that we do not have to share someone’s faith, nationality, race, gender, politics, or history for their suffering to make a claim upon us. Our principles are tested not when we apply them to people like us, but when we extend them to those we have been taught to see as the “other.” Hinenibegins the moment someone else’s call becomes our own.

Condition 7: Keep answering. 

The Hineni mindset does not end when the moment itself passes. Often, the response outlives the emergency and becomes a calling. Though Sarri Singer had only intended to hold a press conference the morning after surviving a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem, her advocacy and support for victims of terrorism around the world became a lifelong endeavor. Trauma psychologist Miri Bar-Halpern had posted her phone number online in the wake of the October 7 Massacre as a way of fending off her own helplessness, but that single act evolved first into a network and then into teaching, research, testimony, and advocacy. Shai’s instinctive choice to speak out about support for terrorism on college campuses has grown into an extensive project of research, education, and public speaking. 

Hineni moments do not merely change what we do. They change who we become. The first time we answer the call, we are responding to the moment. The second, third, and fourth time, we act as people shaped by that first decision. Eventually, for many people, answering the call becomes a calling.

By the time we finished reading these essays, the question that had launched this project had changed. We had invited people who inspire us to share what made them stand up, speak out, and answer the call. But as we read their stories, we found ourselves asking something different altogether: How can we help more people say Hineni?

There is no shortage of burning bushes in our world. Some blaze for all to see. Others smolder quietly, just off the beaten path. The question is not whether these fires exist—they do, and the heat is rising. The question is whether we will notice them, turn toward them, and make them our concern.

You may never hear a voice call your name from the flames. But that does not mean you have not been called. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you that you are needed. Pay attention to the raging fire, then look within. Can you feel the moral urgency? What is it asking of you? What are you prepared to do about it? 

The essays that follow began as answers. Our hope is that, together, they will also become a call. Will you answer it? Will you say Hineni?

It was January 2015 and a close friend from Paris told me she was scared. A few days earlier, jihadi terrorists had attacked the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, murdering journalists who had published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. Then another terrorist entered the Hypercacher kosher supermarket and murdered four Jewish shoppers. Her father-in-law and brother-in-law had been there earlier that day. 

Although my friend was understandably shaken by these events, what stood out the most was something else she said: that since moving from Israel to Paris, she had barely mentioned to anyone that she was Jewish. She wasn’t open about how she used to live in Israel. She hid that part of herself.

I immediately understood why. Growing up in Hong Kong and London, I learned early that being Jewish could become an issue just because someone else decided to make it one. In Hong Kong, a boy who bullied me marched around doing the Nazi salute while other children laughed. In London, kids spotted the Ten Commandments on my Jewish school blazer and surrounded me while shouting, “Get that Jew.” I got away physically unscathed. The damage was on the inside, where no one could see.

There were other moments over the years—some subtle, some not. Most Jews know the feeling. You can be moving through life when, without warning, someone reminds you that they’ve already decided what a “Jew” is. So, when my friend expressed her experience, I empathized with her fear. I also hated that she felt she had to live that way. That night, after our conversation, I was inspired to write—as if to her. I wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.

The first three words appeared on the screen: I’m that Jew. I stared at them, wondering what they meant. Who was “that Jew”? What Jew was I? Was I the stereotype? The caricature invented before a real Jewish person had even entered the room? What does “that Jew” even mean?

I kept writing. About the thinking Jew, the working Jew, the funny Jew, the arrogant Jew, the humble Jew, the brilliant Jew and the ridiculous Jew. I wrote about our contradictions, flaws, achievements, and humanity. No longer just to my friend, those three words became my own declaration. My personal testimony. Something that had been sitting inside me for years, since childhood, was finally finding its way out. I wanted to flush that familiar, hostile stereotype of the Jew down the toilet and replace it with everything that we truly are. Real people in all our beauty, breadth, and messiness. 

I posted the piece online. People shared it. Strangers responded. One person commented, “I’m that so-nice-to-know-I’m-not-the-only-one-who-feels-that-way Jew.” Right then and there I realized that what I had written wasn’t mine alone. I started imagining the written piece as something people could experience visually. A video with every characteristic paired with a real Jewish person. Albert Einstein would be “that wild-haired-genius Jew.” Jerry Seinfeld, “that not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-that Jew.” Amy Winehouse, “that damn-I’m-gone-too-soon Jew.”

I committed to my vision and went to work. After months of writing, editing, and producing, I had a six-minute film. People I trusted loved it but told me it was too long and that nobody would watch it. Though I understood their point of view, shortening it didn’t sit well with me. The hateful stereotypes we were facing were already doing the cutting—taking millions of people and reducing them to one or two ugly characteristics. I didn’t want to respond by reducing us again. In fact, I didn’t want to respond at all. I was making a statement. 

Then came October 2015. Israel was swept up by a wave of terrifying stabbings across the country. Jews were attacked by Palestinian terrorists in shopping centers, on streets, at bus stops and restaurants. Ordinary people in ordinary places. The world’s condemnation was absent, and the silence was deafening. Angry and frustrated, I became consumed with finishing the film and worked for 48 hours straight without sleep. When it was finally ready, the anxiety of posting and putting my name on it became real. 

It meant I’d be telling my friends, colleagues, and clients exactly where I stood as a proud Jew. Knowing it would come with risks, I momentarily considered releasing it anonymously, but doing so felt absurd. “I’m That Jew,” by someone who would rather not say who they are. Sure, I was concerned about inviting hatred into my life (and, possibly, into the lives of my wife and kids) but hiding felt wrong. Hiding would make the whole thing meaningless, and meaning is everything to me. If I was going to say, “I’m that Jew,” I had to be willing to say it as myself. I quickly drafted a caption for my Facebook post, as much for myself as for anyone else: 

Lest any Jew forget, because of all the violence directed at us, the hatred, the incitement to harm and kill, the vile words, the missiles, the rockets, the knives, the rocks, the deafening silence of the world that we all feel right now, we should be proud of our heritage, accomplishments and spirit. Just like anyone else on this planet. And we shouldn’t be shy about it.

Rise up, speak up and keep your chins up. We’ll get through this because we love life, and we’re strong, smart, funny, beautiful, talented, resilient, educated, hardworking, positive and so much more. We’re okay. In fact, we’re more than okay. We rock. And here’s a little reminder.

The video began spreading within hours. The emotional reaction was nothing short of staggering. Thousands shared it and, in doing so, put their own names on it. The numbers kept climbing, reaching a million views within days. Strangers offered to translate the script. Ten languages later, Jews and non-Jews continued commenting, liking, and sharing from around the world. Alone in my study, reading messages from people I’d never meet but who had found their self-expression through something I had made, I sat and wept. What had begun as a letter to a frightened friend had become something much larger than either of us.

Years went by and the film went on to be seen over 15 million times. Anti-Semitism, unfortunately, also held strong. I continued writing, expressing, and creating on social media. Jewish advocacy became my passion.

Then came October 7, 2023. Like so many people in Israel and across the Jewish world, my life changed that morning. I immediately made the decision to pause new client work and turn all of my attention to giving Jews and Israelis strength, hope, and a way to express what I knew we all needed: a reminder of who we are and that we would get through this too. 

I created non-stop, often working 18-hour days. I made new films, wrote articles, designed posters, created campaigns, and collaborated with Jewish and non-Jewish allies alike. I travelled to the U.S., Canada, and Australia to support Jewish communities and strengthen their Jewish identity. More often than not, I was trying to give words to what so many people felt but were struggling to articulate. Every time I put a piece of work out in the world, I hoped others would make it their own. I wanted Jews to feel less alone in whatever they were trying to express. I wanted to help them fight the good fight. Above all, I wanted the world to truly see us.

“I’m that Jew” has never been about me. It’s about Jewish people embracing and openly celebrating everything about who we are. 

That desire was the motivation behind ZIONisM, a recent project of mine, co-created with Dr. Einat Wilf. We’ve all been watching in horror as the word “Zionism” is bastardized to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and many Jews are understandably hesitant to use it themselves. Combining Einat’s unique subject material and historical expertise and my emotive storytelling and communication skills, we tried to explain what Zionism is clearly, accurately, and without apology.

Jewish identity isn’t a subject I casually dip into whenever it’s convenient to do so. It’s my home, my history, and my core. I’m a creative director by training and manage my own agency—Natie Branding. I understand how stories can inspire and move people bravely to action. These are the tools I have, so these are the tools I use. I didn’t create I’m That Jew to defend Jewish identity. I created it to own it.

I imagine that most Hineni moments don’t arrive with grandeur. Sometimes they begin with a conversation. In 2015, a dear friend living in Paris told me she was too scared to reveal her Jewish identity and show the world who she really was. In solidarity, I wrote her a letter that turned out to be a letter for all of us. I had no idea that three words, “I’m That Jew,” would lead to years of creative work more personal and rewarding than I could ever have imagined. I only knew that silence felt wrong. 

And so, I continue.

I’m that Jew. And here I am.

Hineni.

My life was shaped by a hundred tiny yeses—quiet moments when something inside of me answered a voiceless question. My first yes came long before I even knew the word “Hineni.” I was a little girl in the Israeli town of Bat Yam, where my grandparents lived and where my parents would transplant us, every year, for months at a time. To me, it wasn’t a vacation and Israel wasn’t just a place we visited. It was my second home. It was part of who we were. Every summer they brought us back, making sure we knew where we came from and who our people were. They taught us how that connection and that responsibility didn’t stop at the edge of an ocean.

During one such stay, my older brother took me to the neighborhood pitzutziya, where I got a grape-flavored ice pop and he chose a lemon one. We shared a bag of salted sunflower seeds as we wandered outside. I remember my sticky purple fingers. The August heat. The aged white government building across the street. The bus stop in front of it.

Then a bus pulled up. Soldiers stepped off. They looked exhausted. Their green uniforms clung to them in the summer heat. Their berets sat slightly askew on their shoulders after a long day. M-16s rested on tired shoulders. They weren’t standing in formation. They weren’t heroes in a movie. They were just nineteen-year-olds who happened to be our soldiers. And I couldn’t stop staring.

Even now, as I write this, decades later, I can still feel the butterflies that filled my chest. It wasn’t excitement. It was pride. It was belonging. I remember thinking, with a certainty that only children seem capable of, I want to be them. One day, I will be. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that was my first Hineni moment.

That day, I didn’t just fall in love with the soldiers. I also fell in love with the idea of service. Not because I romanticize war—quite the opposite—but because people who serve carry responsibilities and burdens that the rest of us pray we never have to carry, and they do so with quiet dignity. My parents never taught us to worship the uniform. They taught us to love the people inside it. Loving them has always meant wanting them to have to carry a little less.

The summer I turned ten offers another vivid memory of such an early Hineni moment. I wanted to understand the country that had captured my heart—my country—not only through its people, its streets, its sounds, and its stories, but through its language, too. I was already fluent in Hebrew, but I needed to be able to read it. To decipher its letters. To decode street signs, store names, and graffiti. Reading Hebrew felt like more than learning an alphabet. It felt like learning another way to belong.

My Saba Yosef took me to the mall and bought me a workbook called Hebrew at Your Ease. I sat with it for hours, slowly memorizing and sounding out letters until they became words. By the time I returned home to the U.S., I had taught myself to read and write Hebrew.

The passion I felt for my heritage didn’t stay confined to my grandparents’ place in Bat Yam. Back in the States, I asked my parents to transfer me to a Jewish school. Another small “yes.” Another quiet step toward a place and a people that were already my home.

Years later, I became the first American-born member of my family to return to Israel and volunteer for military service. Years after that, my American-born nephews would follow suit. I wish I could tell you serving was everything I dreamed it would be. Instead, I had to be medically discharged. I didn’t contribute the way I had wanted to. I have never admitted publicly how ashamed I felt—and in many ways still do. I had wanted so badly to give something back to the country and the people I loved. Suddenly, I couldn’t. Or so I believed. But then came the summer of 2014, and with it, another opportunity to answer the call.

I had just graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s in speech-language pathology when a war broke out following the kidnapping and murder of three young Jewish boys: Gilad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach. I had landed my first real job in Harlem, and my career was only beginning. Yet all I wanted to do was quit. I wanted to go home, to Israel, and help. But I couldn’t enlist. I wasn’t eligible to do so. So I asked myself a different question: If I can’t serve that way, what can I do? How can I be of service?

I started raising money. I flew to Israel with desperately needed equipment, which I delivered to combat soldiers. I showed up at rehabilitation hospitals, determined to volunteer as a speech-language pathologist, only to find out that I wasn’t licensed in Israel and that the paperwork would take months to complete. Frustrated, I spent my days visiting rehabilitation units instead and offering them my expertise, and most of all, my friendship. Somewhere along the way, the patients I supported became like my little brothers. I sat with them, listened as they strummed their guitars, lounged with them out on the lawn, watching the trails of intercepted rockets streak across the summer sky before scrambling to the shelters together. When each attack was over, we’d come back out, tune the guitars again, and keep singing. One day, I asked them what they wanted most, expecting them to ask for something they had lost. Instead, they asked for something they missed: “A party. No guests. Just us.”

And so that’s what we did. I found a D.J. We fired up the grills and covered tables with food. For one night, the rehabilitation center was transformed into a raucous gathering of old friends. At three in the morning, Israeli musician Kobi Peretz showed up and sang under the stars. For a few hours, these patients were no longer wounded soldiers. They were twenty-year-old kids again. They were having fun again. Never a conscious decision, my heart had simply decided to say “yes” long before my head could catch up.

Then came October 7, 2023, the moment life asked me to show up again. There was no grand decision, dramatic realization, or weighing of options. As instinctive as breathing, I picked up the phone, asked how I could help equip the very soldiers who’d become my family long ago, and how I could help speak for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. My cousin, Omer Shem Tov, having been taken hostage into Gaza, was one of those people. Once again, life asked to keep showing up and I simply kept saying yes, one impossible day after another. 

Just like earlier in my life, I found that my responsibility didn’t just vanish into thin air when the crisis ended. Instead, it simply changed shape. After Omer and the rest of the hostages were released, I began looking for new ways to make a difference. That search led me to found Emet Advocacy— an organization dedicated to helping people understand the Jewish and Israeli story, to building bridges where others put up walls, and to defending truth without surrendering compassion. At its core is a simple belief: that advocacy and humanity should never have to compete. The work changed. The responsibility did not.

People still ask me why I chose this work. The truth is, life decided for me and I simply stopped refusing it. When I try to trace the source of that refusal, all I see is that little girl in Bat Yam, sticky grape ice pop in one hand, sunflower seeds in the other, watching a bus full of tired soldiers step into the August heat. Sometimes I wonder what that little girl would think if she could see where that first yes eventually led. To The White House, to the United Nations, to hundreds of flights, to thousands of strangers, to five hundred and five days of fighting for my cousin’s life. To Emet Advocacy. That little girl couldn’t have imagined any of it. She only knew that when those tired young soldiers stepped off the bus, something inside her quietly called out to her: One day, you’ll show up for them. 

Hineni isn’t necessarily saying, “I know exactly what to do.” It’s saying, “I can’t pretend this isn’t my problem anymore.”It’s answering the call. That little girl has been answering that call ever since. She just didn’t know the answer had a name.

Here I am.

Hineni.

We had just put the kids to bed and sat down for a late-night meal of macaroni and cheese and margaritas in our pajamas. It was the spring of 2023, and the mood in our vacation rental in Upstate New York was giggly and intimate. But then, with the air warm and the record player softly crackling in the background, one of our friends asked how my writing was going. 

The question always put me on edge. True to the stereotype, I had always been an open and direct Israeli. Yet, with my closest writer friends already having published one or two novels, I had grown accustomed to downplaying my own struggles. Caught between insecurity and impostor syndrome, I had learned to paint an optimistic “any-day-now” picture to anyone who asked, keeping my fear that my memoir might never be published carefully under wraps. 

But that night I was tired of pretending. I had just gone through another fruitless round of pitching to agents only to be told that the writing was strong but that they were “going to have to pass” because they “wouldn’t know how to sell it.” Sitting there with close friends, I no longer had it in me to pretend everything was fine. So instead, I told them everything. 

“I know this is a common problem for writers,” I apologized, as though I was telling them a story they had heard a hundred times before, “but I’d like to think I’ve tried everything I can. But sometimes I think it’s all my fault for not pushing hard enough. That if I had real ambition, I’d figure out a path to make this book happen. Other times, I wonder if I should just accept that I’m a big, fat loser and that no one is interested in what I have to say.”

I braced myself for the pity party I assumed was coming. I had heard it all before. Though I knew I wouldn’t believe them, I waited for their reassurance that my worth extended beyond my writing and didn’t depend on public recognition. Having finally given voice to what I had been carrying for so long, I now sat before them—sad, needy, and exposed. 

Instead, my friend covered his mouth, shook his head, and, his voice brimming with love and wonder, said the four words that would keep coming back to me. “God, you’re so open.” 

Pay attention, a voice whispered in my head. Your vulnerability is not a weakness. It’s a superpower. Keep saying the embarrassing things out loud.

Just six months later, I watched, eyes bleary with grief and horror, as people who knew and loved me rushed to social media to minimize, defend, and justify the massacre, rape, and abduction of Jews and Israelis. Having grown up in Israel knowing that every bus ride or café outing could end in a suicide bombing, it was unfathomable to me how they could support such brutal acts of terror. As a liberal Zionist who had often protested the Israeli government, consistently advocated for peaceful coexistence, and still believed in a two-state solution, I had assumed that empathy for people on both sides of this conflict—particularly among my writer friends—would be the prevailing view. I was wrong.

When I commented on a celebrated novelist and fellow Columbia alum’s social media post dismissing the suffering of Israelis, she responded with a torrent of accusations that escalated with each exchange. I pleaded with her to see the humanity and pain of everyone caught in the conflict. Instead, in a declaration of allegiance to the Palestinian cause, she accused me of my alleged bloodthirst, ridiculing me for daring to challenge someone of South African descent who claimed to understand my country better than I did. Even when I resisted taking the bait of her most provocative remarks—Hey, Yardenne, how many Palestinians did you shoot when you were in the IDF?—she escalated further and sent me a private message. I don’t want to publicly humiliate you, she wrote, but you’re leaving me little choice.

For the first time since the October 7 Massacre, I burst out laughing. You can’t humiliate me, I wrote back, because I have nothing to hide. In training myself to look at my country from every angle, even when it was painful, inconvenient, or scary, I had learned that every country has chapters in its history it would rather not read aloud. As long as I was willing to say the embarrassing things out loud, no one could use them against me. 

As the first weeks of the Israel-Hamas war passed in a haze, it became abundantly clear that the social circles where I’d pitched my tent—the politically progressive literary and academic worlds of New York City—were not what I had believed them to be. Twisting facts and suspending the very empathy they so proudly professed, they excused and dismissed Jewish pain while ignoring, justifying, and celebrating Hamas’ crimes. Close friends cut ties, arguing that my advocacy for the release of the hostages was nothing more than a cynical attempt to distract from the rising death toll in Gaza. Colleagues and acquaintances flooded social media with “hot takes” on Hamas and Israel, ranging from the hateful to the delusional. Even so, I kept engaging. 

Some, in private conversations, replied with care and compassion, but remained adamant about maintaining a public façade of brave, subversive resistance to what they perceived as the powers-that-be. Others tried to school me on the country I grew up in, countering my lived experience with shallow propaganda. Others still demanded that I “unlearn” Zionism—the belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—before they would even agree to speak to me. Committed to a devil-may-care, “burn it all down” philosophy that never stopped to consider the Israelis trapped in Hamas’s tunnels or the Palestinians suffocating under its oppressive, violent rule, one writer—whose manuscript I had previously volunteered to edit—responded by lashing out and blocking me. 

As the American literary landscape became increasingly inhospitable to Jews who refused to denounce—or at least distance themselves from—Israel, I was faced with a choice. I could follow the advice of some well-meaning friends and relatives, keep my mouth shut, cut my losses, and hope for that professional acceptance I had been longing for. I could scrub Israel from my writing, erasing where I was born and raised, where I had lived for most of my life, and where most of my family still lived. Or, I could remain open. I could remain vulnerable. I could refuse to edit myself out of my own story.

When a renowned literary magazine that had published my work in the past began taking on a decisively anti-Israel, pro-violent-resistance bent, I contacted the editor to share my concerns, citing several of their more egregious pieces, including an essay comparing the Hamas paragliders who massacred Israelis at the Nova Festival to birds breaking free from their cages. In response, she invited me to submit an essay presenting my own perspective. 

Never before had I felt such urgency about a writing project. I worked for hours, outlining, expanding, and fact-checking every point I made. I described the cancellation of authors who so much as mentioned Israel’s existence in their books, the journals that banned “Zionists” from even submitting their work for consideration, the publishers committing to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the literary magazines publishing anti-Israel bigotry, denying the events of October 7, and belittling the rise of anti-Semitism. I included hyperlinks to corroborating sources. I explained the trap of offering Jews conditional acceptance only as long as they toed the party line. I described how my own long-standing writing group had ghosted me. Above all, I chose vulnerability. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the editor rejected my submission. Proving the exact point I was making, she dismissed my argument—and the many references backing it up—because she did not agree with my premise. A few weeks later, my essay was published by the Jewish Book Council. My former friends read it. My former professors read it. It was out there for colleagues, potential employers, agents, publishers, or anyone else who felt compelled to vet me. Who I was, where I stood, and what I believed were now out in the open. There was no going back. 

The months and years since have been an eerie combination of despair and relief. I had burned bridges simply by being myself. But now I was free. I no longer had a community to lose. I no longer had opportunities to miss out on. Writing, once a cross to bear, became a source of joy again. I feel it whenever someone thanks me for giving words to what they’d been struggling to express. I feel it whenever a reader tells me they disagree with my views but appreciate my integrity. I feel it whenever I say the embarrassing thing out loud. In the midst of horror, grief, and isolation, I found my voice. Here it is.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Just days after the murder of George Floyd, I sat through a long, well-intentioned training program about diversity, equity, and inclusion only to find out that Jews were not considered part of the training. While I realized that being included in a slide deck was not the same as being seen, protected, or valued in an organization, I understood I had to do something. At the time, I had already helped create a small, informal space for my Jewish colleagues and I to meet and talk over drinks. Yet, what started as a mere social gathering now felt like something much larger—the seed of a deeply needed community. Determined to help it grow, I set about transforming it into a global Jewish staff network within the multinational company I was working for.

The process was not straightforward. Hitting repeated roadblocks and goalposts that seemed to move every time we made progress, we were told by our non-Jewish colleagues that the way we define ourselves was completely wrong. Repeatedly told that our burgeoning group was “just a religion,” that our existence as Jews represented “too small a minority to support,” and that our effort to create a workplace community was “redefining what it means to have a formal group,” each response revealed something deeper than mere resistance. Instead, each one exposed how easily Jewish identity can be minimized when it asks to be recognized on its own terms.

At the same time, my colleagues and I were encountering real anti-Semitism in the workplace. Blood libel was free to be shared on our internal Wiki site, and some corners of our instant messaging system were filled with anti-Zionist and often outright anti-Semitic rhetoric. The company was unprepared to deal with it. Soon becoming the go-to person for the Jewish experience at work, I suddenly found myself trying to do more than simply build community. Fighting for our safety, our dignity, and our right to belong without having to constantly justify our existence, I came to realize that the harder I pushed against the system, the more I understood why this work mattered. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jewish colleagues who needed that community in order to thrive at work, and I had become the person willing to keep pushing that vision forward. I wasn’t simply announcing that I was that guy. I was saying “Hineni.” 

The call I had made was soon answered thousands of miles from my home in London, England. While spending Chanukah in Seattle, Washington, I decided to host an impromptu coffee-and-donut meetup for the “local” Jews I worked with. After talking with the wife of one of the attendees who worked for a similarly large technology company whose Jewish employees were struggling in much the same way that we were, I decided to start what would become JewishERGs—the community for Jewish Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders around the world. 

Quickly growing to represent the Jewish ERG Leaders of around 30 companies—each of us strugglingly in unique yet strikingly similar ways—our global community began meeting monthly, with many of us staying in touch in between sessions and supporting one another as we charted out the course for the Jewish communities within our organizations. Then came October 7, 2023.

More than just a metaphorical wake-up call, I was awakened from my sleep by the sound of sirens and distant rocket interceptions. Though I have always felt deeply connected to Israel, being in the country that day made the horror immediate and personal. The scale of the violence, the fear, the grief, and the collective shock were overwhelming. But beyond the pain, something else crystallized for me. The world had shifted, and the Jewish people would need more than sympathy. We would need leadership, structure, courage, and people willing to stand in the gap. The stakes had never been clearer: my work creating Jewish communities within non-Jewish institutions was no longer abstract or symbolic. It was personal, urgent, and necessary. 

This necessity was rapidly being reflected in my inbox, with email upon email from Jews looking to build community, support other Jews at work, and find ways to develop their resilience. After a long day of work as a cybersecurity expert, I would come home to work another six hours on building community.

In March 2024, I returned to Israel. Driven by grief, responsibility, and a need to be present for and with our people in their time of need, when people asked why I came back during a war, all I could really answer was “Because I needed to.” 

Touring southern Israel, seeing with my own eyes the devastation of the October 7 massacre, and visiting wounded soldiers at Sheba Hospital, I began to realize that I could not remain on the edge of this work. Having carried it alongside my career for some time, doing so no longer felt sufficient. The moment was too serious, and the need too great. Upon my return home, I made the decision to leave my job in tech and focus on my passion full time.

That decision was not easy. I had spent years building a stable, respectable, and financially secure career in a field I knew well. Yet, stepping away from that work into uncertainty, I thought about Rabbi Tarfon’s teaching in Pirkei Avot. It was not my duty to finish the work, but neither was I at liberty to neglect it. I had found my calling because, when the moment came, I had said Hineni. 

What I have built since then has grown beyond anything I could ever have imagined. What started as a small community of Jews at my own workplace has evolved into a global network bringing together Jews across dozens of organizations. Responding to the needs of the moment, people were hungry for connection, leadership, honesty, and for Jewish spaces where they could be their full selves. More than a response to a crisis, they wanted infrastructure. They wanted a community that could hold people through fear, pride, uncertainty, and action. I wanted to build one for them. 

I did not set out to leave my career and start a movement. I had set out to solve a problem. But the more I saw, the more I understood that the problem was larger than one workplace, one network, or one organization. It was part of a wider pattern of Jewish invisibility and Jewish vulnerability. The work became bigger because the need was greater.

And so, here I am. Not because I have all the answers, but because I could not remain an observer. Because the Jewish people deserve leaders in the non-Jewish workplace. Because the moment asked for more than concern, and I chose to answer. Because sometimes, the most Jewish thing you can do is build what is missing, stand where others have stepped back, and say plainly that the work is not done, and neither am I at liberty to neglect it.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Like most American Jews, I was raised to be an achievement machine, to stand out professionally while fitting in socially. I became a historian, intrigued by people who escaped the expectations of their goody two-shoes straitjackets to make history. Looking back, that fascination unconsciously foreshadowed my own Hineni moment—or, as I prefer to call it, my Herzl Moment: “coming out” as a Zionist activist in April 2001.

My first undergraduate paper explored the silence of American Jews during the early 1940s, as news about the Holocaust started filtering in from Europe. That project inspired my Harvard senior thesis about Ben Hecht, the highly assimilated novelist, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, whose rewrites helped rescueGone with the Wind. Experiencing his own Hineni moment in the 1930s, Hecht broke the mold. Long disconnected from Judaism, he became a sharp-tongued and indefatigable activist upon learning how the Nazis were demonizing and annihilating his people. By 1942, Hecht was publicizing the Nazi mass murders of European Jewry. Later, he fought hard to help establish the State of Israel.

The more I studied history, the more I found myself drawn to people whose lives were transformed by moments like these. In graduate school, my seminar paper described how Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolinian, finally broke with Great Britain after the Boston Massacre, went on to succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress, and ultimately lost both his son and his home during the American Revolution. Years later, while writing my book Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism, I studied another reluctant advocate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. This liberal, Irish-Catholic, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations experienced his Herzl moment in 1975. Moynihan spearheaded America’s fight against the Soviet and Palestinian effort to humiliate the United States by demonizing Israel, using a forum of nation-states to single out Zionism as “racist.” I didn’t know it then, but I kept writing about the same kind of turning-point: the moment an ordinary life becomes a public one.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to tell one of these stories together with the person who had lived it: In 2020, I co-wrote Never Alone with Natan Sharansky, about his persecution by Soviet anti-Semites following Israel’s decisive victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Overnight, they stopped mocking him as a weakling and began denouncing him as a bully. Learning that the mere existence of a Jewish state 2,200 miles away could so profoundly affect his life in Soviet Russia, Sharansky was inspired to dedicate himself to activism. Having started fighting for his freedom only once he discovered his identity, Sharansky embodies the Zionist idea, that a meaningful life comes from being rooted enough to defend your freedom and free enough to appreciate your roots—even if doing so costs you nine years in a Soviet Gulag.

Branding these pivots “Herzl Moments” honors Theodor Herzl, the assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jew whose own awakening gave birth to modern Zionism. Though Jew hatred haunted Herzl long before the 1894 Alfred Dreyfus trial convinced him that Jews needed their own nation-state, his life changed in 1895 when he emerged as a Zionist. While many scoffed at the notion that the homeless, powerless Jews could ever rebuild a state of their own, Herzl stood his ground, warning, as he did to a skeptic that year, that “where the Jewish cause is concerned I am not to be trifled with.” Accused of being detached from reality, Herzl insisted that standing idly by and watching when your house is burning down, “is certainly more insane than to rush up with a modern fire engine.” From that moment on, Herzl was no longer merely describing the Jewish condition. He was trying to change it.

While raised to be a passionate Zionist caring deeply about Israel, I enjoyed living the American Jewish ideal: being Jewish at home and American on the street. Proudly Jewish, I nonetheless loved my neutral name—inherited thanks to my father’s choice to perform an “ansky-ectomy” on his own last name, Troyansky. As “Gil Troy” I passed. I felt normal, all-American. Graduating with a Ph.D. from a Harvard embarrassed by its history of anti-Semitism, by 1999, I was already a full professor at McGill University, back when Canada was delightfully boring, polite, and decent. Whenever Jewish students sheepishly explained they would have to miss class for Passover or the High Holy Days, I wished them “happy holiday” in Hebrew. I enjoyed surprising them with my own Jewish identity, while—wink-wink—letting them know they belonged.

Academia’s woke anti-Zionist mania, however, doomed that life. There I was—minding my own business, happily married, raising a family, building my academic career—when, in September 2000, Yasser Arafat led the Palestinian national movement away from negotiations and back toward terrorism. Even then, as my Israeli friends were dealing with suicide bombers blowing up cafes, buses, and shopping malls, the world—including many of my colleagues—blamed Israel. Academics, capable of making anything complicated, suddenly could do no better than spout silly slogans about Israeli apartheid and Zionism as racism. Such hard-hearted soft-headedness shattered my covenant with academia. How could I remain silent while my people were once again under attack?

Rejecting the negativity, I submitted an op-ed to The Montreal Gazette marking Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israeli Independence Day, in April 2001. Titled “Why I am a Zionist,” it was not a response to the scourge of Palestinian terrorism, but a celebration of Zionism itself as an anchoring, inspiring identity. Line after line started with the refrain, “I am a Zionist because…” The conclusion must have resonated deeply with Jewish Montrealers, who emblazoned it on posters thousands of them waved during their annual “March to Jerusalem” two months later. I proclaimed: “A century ago, Zionism revived pride in the label ‘Jew’; today, Jews must revive pride in the label ‘Zionist.’” Just 800 words long, that article changed the course of my life. It was my own Herzl moment. 

Though I remain an American historian, I’ve become a Zionist activist too. Viewed as a broad, welcoming peoplehood platform, Zionism fuses the excitement of returning to our roots in our homeland and our traditional sense of community, with our old-new mission to show the world what a healthy expression of liberal democratic nationalism looks like. As Zionists, we learn from the past, keep building and being rebuilt in the present, while never, ever, stopping to dream about an even better future.

Six years after publishing that op-ed, my wife, four kids, and I took a sabbatical in Jerusalem and never looked back. Jokingly referring to our decision to stay as “the world’s longest sabbatical,” I avoided the fate of becoming a swivel-headed academic, forever looking over my shoulder, wondering what my colleagues might say about me. Instead, I allowed myself to embrace the kind of envy the Talmud praises—the kind that urges you to follow in your heroes’ footsteps. In the process, I’ve discovered who I am, where I stand, and what I stand for. 

Here I am. 

Hineni.

The Jewish fire inside me, which has been there since my earliest memory, was lit by Judith Aftergut Meller, the first caretaker I had outside of my parents. A child survivor of Auschwitz, Judith was orphaned at age thirteen when her mother, father, and siblings all died at the hands of the Nazis. Having started sharing her story with me when I was two or three—far too young to comprehend it—she told it over and over to anyone who would listen, believing that knowing what had happened could teach people something valuable for the next time it did. 

As a very young child, I absorbed Judith’s life story much as I would any other cruel and outlandish fairy tale. A parable, it didn’t seem so different than, say, the story of Hansel and Gretel. From an early age, I understood that villains existed, that they put people into ovens, and that nothing was too awful to be true. Yet, though the Nazis murdered her entire family, Judith harbored no particular bitterness toward Germans or Germany, believing that kind of evil can be found in every group of people on Earth. These days, as I see that evil taking so many different forms all around me, I find myself thinking of her constantly. 

Still, there’s always been a part of me that refused to believe in the realness of the people who lived in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Irrationally, I perceived them as black-and-white people living in the land of black-and-white TV. And so I always wondered: who on earth were these “friends and neighbors” of the Jews, the people who looked away from what was happening? Who were these people who so lacked in critical thinking skills that they fell for Hitler’s hatred in spite of their close relationships with the Jews? Could I ever have friends like that? Though I would have very much preferred to have never found out which of my friends would have made perfectly good Germans, these days I often feel like it’s simply and irreducibly the Jewish fate. In every place and age, we are doomed to see with our own eyes and experience within our own lives exactly how it happens. 

On the day Judith escaped Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mengele had just consigned her to the gas chambers. Having been so thin by that morning’s selection process that he simply lifted her off the ground with one brutal fist closed around her neck, Judith looked straight into his eyes—eyes she described as black and dead, flat and inhuman as the eyes of a shark—and every ounce of her ferocious will was suddenly funneled into a marrow-deep, overpowering, visceral conviction. Dangling there, hanging from his hand, she thought, You will not be the death of me. 

That very hour she escaped. When he flung her to the left—the side consigned to death—she managed to dart behind him and bolt into the surrounding crowd. So thin that she easily disappeared into the chaos of Auschwitz, she wended her way into a prisoner regiment leaving for a labor camp. Years later, living in Portland, Oregon, after weathering a series of staggering hardships throughout the rest of her life—marital turmoil, single parenthood to a child with cognitive impairments, ongoing financial insecurity, illness, exhaustion, depression, and chronic pain—she was among the first to avail herself of the state’s nascent Death With Dignity law. Seventy-four years old and suffering of terminal cancer, Judith declared that choosing the specific time, day, and method of her death was her final fuck you to Dr. Mengele. 

Having taught me defiance, Judith also left me with a question that guided much of my life: how would I carry her torch? Though I was not Judith’s biological daughter, she always treated me as one of her own, and I always thought of her as one of my mothers. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted to make her proud. I wanted to avenge her suffering. I wanted to realize her dreams. 

As a kid, I had many ideas about how I would do this. I would become a Nazi hunter like Simon Weisenthal. I would join the Mossad and assassinate terrorists. I would “Save Soviet Jewry,” as signs all over Jewish Pittsburgh exhorted us to do in the 1970s, piloting a plane into the USSR under cover of night, landing on some secret, prearranged Soviet airstrip, ushering refuseniks into the cabin, and flying them back to Israel or America. Watching the Sabbath scene in Fiddler on the Roof, I wanted Golde’s maternal blessing for myself: to come to be, in Israel, a shining name.

Though not as dramatic or heroic, I found other ways of carrying Judith’s torch. When I was 16-years-old, I won first place in the writing division of my city’s Holocaust Arts & Writing Contest with a poem titled Despair in Auschwitz.Then, in what would become the first fan letter I ever wrote, I mailed the poem to Elie Wiesel, the internationally renowned author and Holocaust survivor. To my amazement, he wrote back, thanking me for my letter and reminding me of the enduring power of words. Thirty-four years later, after one of my social media posts defending Israel had been widely shared, a message from his son, Elisha, appeared in my Facebook inbox. 

Astounded that both father and son had each written to me—more than three decades apart and without knowing the other had done so—and that both had told me essentially the same thing, I realized that I would not become a Nazi hunter, an assassin, or a stealth pilot. Instead, I would fight for my people with the skills I had. Writing—my career, my passion—would be my weapon of choice. Looking back, I now see that my entire life has been leading me to this moment. 

Before October 7, 2023, I made a steady income as a ghostwriter. I loved my clients and I loved my work, but after the massacre and the public response to it, I hit an internal wall. I could no longer devote my time and energy to helping other people tell their stories while feeling an overwhelming responsibility to tell our own. And so, I matched each of my clients with other writers, kissed my income goodbye, and made Jewish advocacy my full-time job. 

Since then, I’ve created a Jewish newsletter that goes out several times weekly, two Jewish magazines, the country’s largest Jewish book club, and a still-secret initiative dedicated to strengthening Jewish presence in left-leaning and anti-Semitic social media spaces. With dreams of launching a Jewish publishing house, everything I have built has been—and remains—available for free, with one purpose: to celebrate, embolden, and lift up Jewish writers. At a time when Zionist voices are increasingly silenced and Jewish creativity is subjected to ideological litmus tests, I wanted to build the kind of platform I wished already existed. Though I earn far less than I ever did as a ghostwriter, I have never been more professionally fulfilled in my life. 

The social marginalization of Jews in America, especially in the left-leaning spaces I have called home for most of my life, has been painful and infuriating. But we Jews are well trained in social exclusion. We know how to build when others refuse to let us belong. We built our own hospitals. We built our own medical schools. We built our own law firms. We built our own colleges. We built our own theaters. We built Hollywood. Now, once again, we’re building our own spaces, communities, and platforms. 

I do not miss a single space in which I was once welcomed and no longer am. To all the people and places that have pushed us to the margins—or out the door altogether—I say: good riddance, goodbye, and good luck. Good luck without your Jews. As for me, I’m a Jew in this life, first and last. That is the loyalty I will choose above any other. 

Here I am.

Hineni.

I come from a long lineage of Jews who took incredible risks for the survival of the Jewish people. On my mother’s side, my six great uncles were partisans in the forests of Nazi-ravaged Europe, and all but one lost their lives during the war. On my father’s side, my grandfather fought in the Israeli War of Independence, desperately working to break through the siege of Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews were deprived of food, water, and medicine by the Arab forces, while simultaneously befriending the residents of Abu Ghosh, the only Arab village on the road to Jerusalem to allow the passage of Jewish humanitarian convoys. 

Compared with theirs, my own hineni moment seems almost embarrassingly ordinary. Not only were my relatives and ancestors significantly more courageous than I am, but their hineni moments were also much more dramatic. For some, it was Hitler’s maniacal plot to exterminate European Jewry that forced them to take action. For others, it was the threat of the annihilation of a Jewish state that had yet to declare its independence. For me, it was simply a string of anti-Semitic acts of vandalism in Pico-Robertson, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood in western Los Angeles.

Let me back up a little bit first.

As a kid, I devoured Elie Wiesel’s Night and Eli Ben-Hanan’s biography of Israel’s most famous spy, Eli Cohen, Our Man in Damascus. As a freshman in high school, I printed a photo I’d shot of the Kotel, Temple Mount, and Al-Aqsa Mosque to show my history teacher how much he didn’t actually understand about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And then, fresh out of high school, I took a summer job at the Museum of the Jewish Community of Costa Rica, taking it upon myself to restructure their visitors’ tour. Not yet knowing it, I had already begun putting together the story I would dedicate my career to writing.

That story erupted in the spring of 2020, in the wake of the murder of a black American man by a white police officer. Digging his knee into George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the incident was caught on camera and disseminated widely, horrifying the nation, myself included, and bringing as many as 26 million Americans to the streets chanting “Black Lives Matter!” as they marched against police brutality. The overwhelming majority of the protestors were peaceful. Some weren’t. 

And then, as so often happens in times of chaos, anti-Semitism began to creep up. At first, it appeared in subtler forms, with whispers of the “Deadly Exchange”—a conspiracy theory claiming American police brutality stems from cooperation with Israeli security forces while conveniently ignoring similar partnerships with Canadian, French, British, Australian, and other police departments. Before long, the rhetoric gave way to action, as protestors turned their anger toward Jewish businesses, schools, and synagogues, defacing them with anti-Semitic graffiti and carrying out break-ins across the predominantly Jewish Los Angeles neighborhood of Pico-Robertson. 

Shocked that Orthodox Jews minding their own business had become targets, I shared my concerns with a friend, only to have them dismissed and the whole affair labeled “a white supremacist psyop.” “The left,” she insisted, “would never hurt Jews,” either unaware of—or unwilling to grapple with—the history of Soviet Jewry. Rather than engaging with my argument on its merits, she dismissed me as someone who “sounds like a Trumper,” reducing my concerns as a Jew worried about the resurgence of the world’s oldest hatred to mere partisan politics. Three years later, in the shadow of the October 7 massacre, she finally drifted out of my orbit.

My shock, however, didn’t end there. At the time, I ran a small online jewelry business called Roots Metals and had built a modest following, consisting mostly of independent artists and small business owners, the overwhelming majority of whom, like myself, leaned left. As activism migrated to social media during the world’s descent into the great void known as COVID-19, I watched how my online community was quick to hop aboard all of the latest social justice trends ranging from Stop Asian Hate to Black Lives Matter. I supported those movements too. But when Jews became the target of hatred, all I heard were crickets.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Just two years prior, after an American white supremacist murdered eleven congregants in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during Shabbat services, I noticed how many left-wing activists were determined to engage with the massacre in every way except for a reckoning with anti-Semitism. Ignoring the murderer’s explicit anti-Semitic motives and his documented hostility to Donald Trump, they reframed the attack primarily as a debate about gun control and cast all blame on the president. The year before, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched down Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying Tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” which the predominantly left-leaning mainstream media had largely reported as “you will not replace us!” Yet now, as that same anti-Semitic rhetoric increasingly gave way to violence, few seemed willing to say a thing.         

Eventually, I reached the point where staying silent felt harder than speaking up. I opened up my Instagram stories and typed out a rant. Though in retrospect I was biting off more than I could chew, I tried to explain the history of the Jewish people, the history of anti-Semitism, and my gripes against the raging silence of my online peers. I’m not sure I was entirely coherent. I’m certain there were typos. After all, it’s hard to make sense when you’re fuming. For the first time, I was using the wealth of knowledge I’d accumulated over the course of my life, sharing it with the world the way friends had urged me to for years. I didn’t know it yet, but those Instagram stories marked the beginning of my online advocacy.

What followed was both expected and unexpected. As my old followers dropped like flies—some leaving the now-obligatory “What about Palestine?” comment on their way out—new followers showed up. Then more. Then more still. They wanted to know more about Jewish history and were hungry for all the details. They wanted to understand the patterns of anti-Semitism I was identifying and learn how to identify them too. They wanted the language to describe what they too had long sensed but had never quite known how to explain.

In a way, I became a loud and proud Jewish advocate against my will. But it was, I think, precisely what I needed. Pushing past my fear of being the center of attention—a fear I continue to grapple with to this day—I discovered something important I had never fully appreciated before: the power of my voice. I realized that I have something valuable to say, even as politically divisive public discourse futilely tried to put me in a box. More importantly, I saw that my words can positively impact other people’s lives. I discovered I am here for a bigger purpose than my own little life: to help other Jews find the terminology to describe what they already know in their bones.

So here I am.

Hineni.

On Tuesday, October 10, 2023, while blood was still flowing and fire was still blazing in the kibbutzim and cities near the Gaza border, I got a tattoo on my left hand: Hineni. In Hebrew. 

Impossible to hide. Impossible to deny. 

It was a tiny and probably banal attempt to buoy my soul amid a sinking sensation that now accompanied being Jewish in this world, though I couldn’t say for certain if this was a cowardly new world that had just surfaced, or the world as it has always been, finally revealed.

Up until October 7, 2023, I didn’t know what Hineni truly meant. I understood what the word signified in pivotal moments in the Bible—being fully present and committed, accepting a divine responsibility to act—but I never imagined it could have any relevance to my life. But on the night after the massacre, everything changed. Reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s To Heal a Fractured World, a book about choosing duty over inaction, the words hit me like a physical blow, an emotional punch in the stomach. There it was, the explanation I didn’t know I needed: “Hineni. Here I am, ready to heed Your call, to mend a fragment of Your all-too-broken world.”

Hineni. That single word echoed through my secular brain. Lacking a traditional relationship with God, I had no idea who was calling to me, what they were saying, or what I was being called to do. I just knew the world was, indeed, all-too-broken, and breaking still. I knew it needed mending. I knew that it was my responsibility to step up.  

Probably the first person ever to have had a tattoo emergency, I woke up the next morning, found an artist, and made an appointment. It was not an act of defiance. It was an act of certainty. With every sting of the needle, I imagined my grandfathers, turning in their graves.

For the granddaughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe who came dirt-poor to Mexico and managed to build a rich and plentiful life with Judaism as its axis, a tattoo was certainly not a Yiddishkeit thing to do. And yet, walking out of that studio and into the all-too-broken world with Hineni visible on my hand, I had never felt more Jewish. 

In the nearly three years since the October 7 Massacre, as I became a Jewish activist in conferences and social and mass media, there have been numerous times when looking at that tattoo offered me guidance and strength. Every time I’m attacked, whether by an online mob or by face-to-face aggressors, I look to the tattoo as my superpower—a shield of a word printed on the back of my hand. 

Was I acting by chance or by choice? I didn’t know, and now I no longer care. I may have been in the right—or wrong—places at the right—or wrong—moments, but it was my choice to act, each and every time. Both in real life and on social media (the line between the two growing thinner and blurrier with every passing day), I have often found myself entrenched in controversial conversations around Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. I suppose it was possible to extract myself from these moments, but I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stay silent.

Hineni moments—transformative experiences that look almost like ordinary occurrences to an outside observer—are odd. Both familiar and terrifyingly new, they force you to practice direct honesty while taking a stand for the very first time. It is not easy to interpret a conflict that is both so complex and, in essence, so simple at the same time. War and violence never allow for an easy explanation. But standing up for morality and the rights of all people to freedom and safety is simple. Introducing the everlasting promise of Tikkun Olam to an audience manipulated by algorithms is an uphill battle, a repeated discomfort disguised as courage. But striving for a better, more peaceful world should be something we can all get behind.

Am I saying the right thing? Am I using the correct tone? Am I letting my passion and anger get the best of me? Or am I striking the right balance between brain and heart, reason and empathy? Finding it hard to remain morally disciplined while fighting something morally obscene, I spoke up, hoping it would get easier with time.

Unfortunately, it never did. This is when I learned an important lesson about showing up: Hineni does not eliminate doubt. Instead, it demands action despite doubt. 

Over time, the questions changed. Instead of doubting how I was expressing myself, I started asking who I was speaking to. Was I speaking to the unreachable masses, or was I speaking to the few people still willing to listen? Was I having an impact? What was I trying to achieve?

I am not trying to reach the whole world. Some people—those who already share my views and values—do not need my words. Others have decided not to hear a single thing I say. And yet I refuse to back down, speaking to the people who still have enough doubt in their hearts to listen.

Speaking up is hard. Extremely hard. And yet, every time I try to make the safer choice—trying to remain quiet, holding my tongue and refusing to engage—my left hand betrays me. There it is. Hineni. Not a decoration. Not a slogan. A question. A command. A witness.

Getting that tattoo was not just a turning point. It was a point of no return. Every time I have spoken up, every single statement I’ve posted online or made on my podcast, every public talk I have given—I have done so knowing there is a price to pay. Whether it be losing friends, missing out on job opportunities, facing rabid hatred on social media, or enduring uncomfortable, and sometimes violent, personal attacks, I have found it is a price I am willing to pay. Sometimes I pay it with a smile on my face. Other times, with tears in my eyes.

The tattoo is an instant reminder that what we are going through is not new. That encountering hate, and standing up against it, has been not the exception but the rule of our 5,000-year history. Some Jews find their raison d’étre in prayer, I find mine in standing up against hate in the outside world

But the harshest truth is that even when I’m not taking a stand, even when I’m talking about something completely different, the tattoo is an unequivocal testament to my Jewishness. And that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. Why, then, do I keep speaking up? Why not keep quiet? Why not cover up my hand on occasion?

The answer lies in a comic strip I first saw more than thirty years ago: of an old man and a small child sitting on a park bench. Asked about the number tattooed on his arm, the old man explains that it is a remnant of a time when hate, intolerance, and death ruled the world.

“So, mister, you kept the number to remind yourself of that time?”

“No, dear boy, I kept it to remind you.”

The Hineni on my hand is a source of strength when I speak up. But it is also a reminder to those who see it—Jewish or non-Jewish, curious or uncomfortable—to act, to stand up, to choose dialogue over hate, to believe in tolerance over supremacy. It is a reminder. A reminder to everyone willing to listen of the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people.

Maybe that is the call Rabbi Sacks wrote about—the call to heal this all-too-broken world. Not as a reminder to the self, but to those who have yet to heed the call. To remind you.

Here I am.

Hineni.

As my last name suggests, my family origins trace back to Germany. My great-great grandfather, Rabbi Yosef Breuer, was a leader in the German Orthodox community and a respected figure within German society. His youngest daughter, my great-great aunt, vividly recalls reading Psalms during Kristallnacht while her father was arrested by the Gestapo and their synagogue was being burnt to the ground. As some of the very last Jews to flee Germany from the Nazis, my family found a home in the United States, where they were able to rebuild and sustain their Jewish life and identity. To this day, the synagogue they built in New York City remains standing and active, a living testament not only to the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people, but also to what makes the United States of America such a beautiful, welcoming country.

Because of that history, I have never viewed anti-Semitism as an abstract subject of study or a distant chapter in history. Instead, my story of anti-Semitism is deeply painful and deeply personal. For me, Kristallnacht did not begin with book burnings or broken windows. It began neither with destroyed synagogues nor with expulsions. Kristallnacht began with a pernicious ideology that swept across German society. It began with the acceptance, the normalization, and the celebration of Jew hatred.

Though history never repeats itself exactly, its periods of turmoil often begin in recognizable ways. That is why what I have witnessed at Harvard—the acceptance, the normalization, and the celebration of Jew hatred on campus—has felt so painfully familiar. The treatment of Jewish Americans on college campuses across this country, and in particular at Harvard University, is nothing short of a national emergency. It is blatantly anti-Semitic, frighteningly discriminatory, and deeply illiberal. 

If that sounds hyperbolic, let me show you how my four years at Harvard ended. As I took my seat at commencement, I was handed a ten-page, student-produced newspaper. What should have been a keepsake of the day became something else entirely. To my surprise, the “newspaper” accused Jews of racism for arguing that calls for an Intifada are a direct promotion of violence. The authors went on to defend chants for actual violence like “from water to water Palestine is Arab” and “globalize the Intifada.” 

Then, the 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa, took the stage. “I was called anti-Semitic by power and money,” she boomed into the microphone, “because they want power and money.” Just a week before, she had deployed anti-Semitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families during a graduation ceremony. That same week, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “Intifada, intifada, come to America!” That was how my college education ended—not with a celebration of learning, but with the normalization of anti-Semitism.

These events were just the tip of the iceberg, encapsulating the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for much of the preceding year. During a nearly month-long illegal encampment in the center of Harvard Yard, students and faculty demanded that the university completely divest from what they referred to as “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants tried forcing open Harvard’s gates with bolt cutters, repeatedly violated all time, place, and manner restrictions for demonstrations on campus, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews on their way to class, they were handsomely rewarded by the institution. In exchange for dismantling the encampment and packing up their foul-smelling tents and open-air laundry, the suspensions of all graduate and almost all undergraduate students were revoked. The encampment leaders would later go on to meet with senior university officials to discuss establishing a Palestinian Studies department and sit down with the Harvard Management Corporation to discuss divestment of its $50 billion endowment from Israel. President Alan Garber himself, despite having been depicted by the protesters as a horned Jewish devil, had personally ensured “leniency” in the disciplinary process. 

Then came the final blow, as Harvard’s anti-Semitism taskforce—led by a professor who had repeatedly dismissed reports of anti-Semitism at the university as “exaggerated”—quietly revised its timeline. Jewish students at Harvard had their education disrupted by their classmates calling for an Intifada, sat alongside peers who praised Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, watched thirty-four student groups blame the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Jews themselves, endured countless threats, and spent a significant portion of their college years under the leadership of a university president who described calls for the genocide of Jews as “context-dependent.” Yet, rather than fulfilling its promise to deliver recommendations for combatting Jew-hatred by the end of the spring semester, the taskforce announced that its findings would not be released before the fall.

Even now, more than two years later, little has changed. Although both the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association and the Congressional Committee on Education and The Workforce released damning reports documenting the systematic silencing of Jewish and Israeli voices on campus, the university has yet to announce or implement a single policy in response. In fact, despite findings that Jewish and Israeli students were spat on, assaulted, asked to leave class because their nationality made classmates “uncomfortable,” and even threatened by a machete-wielding staff member—as happened to me personally —Harvard has yet to publicly acknowledge any of these incidents. Instead, the university recently announced a policy of institutional neutrality, declaring that it would refrain from issuing statements on matters of public policy or affairs. Just one day earlier, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee had called for an “open intifada” against “every settler and soldier… in every capital.” Yet, after years of issuing statements on issues ranging from the murder of George Floyd to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Harvard chose institutional neutrality only when confronted with open calls for violence against Jews. 

Yet the Jew-hatred at Harvard does not tell the whole story. Alongside the rising tide of Jew-hatred on campus, there has also been an extraordinary resurgence of Jewish pride. I have witnessed firsthand how thousands of young American Jews rediscovered and publicly reclaimed their Jewish identity. I have seen Chabad houses filled with students gathering for Shabbat dinner. I have seen American and Israeli flags waved on campus by young Jews who have woken up. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, they—and I—have been both unable and unwilling to go back to sleep.

Here we are. 
Still here. 

Hinenu.

We meet in the graffiti-covered streets of southern Tel Aviv, each of us carrying a different kind of history, shaped by experiences that left deep scars. We recognize something in each other immediately—not an explanation, but a resonance. What we bring into the world is not only who we are, but what we have survived. Art, for us, is never a hobby. It is language. It is endurance. It is the only way we know how to translate what cannot be plainly spoken.

Our connection forms quickly, with intensity and recognition at its center. We create together, talk endlessly, move between walls, studios, and streets, always returning to the act of making. Through art, we begin to build a life, not separate from our histories, but made from them. Eventually, we leave Israel for New York.

We arrive with urgency and hope, searching for a place where we can simply be artists, where identity is not constantly weighed down by politics, memory, and inherited narratives. New York is unstable, unpredictable, often difficult—but it is also full of possibility. We struggle financially, yet we feel something we have not felt in a very long time: openness. We begin imagining a future that includes not only survival and creation, but also the possibility of family. Then war breaks out in Israel.

The distance we believed we had built collapses instantly. From afar, we watch events unfold with a sense of helplessness that is physical, immediate, and inescapable. When civilians are taken hostage, we reach for the only language we trust. We create posters. We design simple images of faces, names, presence. We print them out and begin hanging them all over the streets of Manhattan, sharing them online, hoping that someone will stop, look, and remember what is at risk of being forgotten. 

What happens next is immediate and beyond anything we could have anticipated. The posters begin to spread. Volunteers across the world download them, print them, hang them in their own cities. Images appear in places we have never been. Social media amplifies everything. What began as a small artistic response becomes a global grassroots action almost over night.

Within weeks, we find ourselves at the center of a movement that is no longer ours alone. Media outlets call constantly. Interviews multiply. Public figures hold the posters up to cameras. Demonstrations, projections, and coordinated actions appear across continents. The campaign grows faster than our ability to understand it, shaped by urgency and collective emotion. We become recognizable, not as experts or organizers, but as the accidental faces of something much larger.

At the same time, a backlash grows with equal force. Posters are torn down, defaced, and burned. Videos of confrontations circulate widely. Streets become a site of repetition: hanging and tearing, showcasing and erasing. We receive threats over text, email, and phone calls. Conspiracy theories circulate, projecting foreign intentions onto us. Visibility begins to feel less like reach and more like exposure. Our personal lives slowly dissolve beneath the weight of the campaign. 

We stop making our own independent work. Days melt into interviews, coordination, logistics, and crisis management. Financial pressure increases. Emotionally, we carry not only our own fear and exhaustion, but also the expectations of thousands of volunteers and families who look to us for guidance. In the middle of all this, we still try to build a future that includes a child.

The desire for life grows precisely because so much around us is defined by loss. After years of trying, we learn that we are expecting twins. For a brief moment, something soft opens. Hope returns in a form we can almost hold. We marry quietly at City Hall.

In our wedding photograph, we hold posters of two kidnapped children. The image feels both unbearable and honest—an intersection of love, grief, and responsibility that we do not know how to separate. We return to work the same day. The pressure does not ease up.

Exhaustion accumulates in layers. Stress becomes constant background noise. Eventually, we experience loss—first one embryo, then the second. The grief is profound, private, and difficult to name. Publicly, we carry on. We give interviews. We coordinate. We function. Internally, we feel fractured, numb, and suspended. As time passes, the movement begins to shift.

Some hostages return, while others remain behind. Media attention begins to move elsewhere. Internal tensions emerge among organizers and collaborators. Questions of credit, authorship, and recognition create fractures in what once felt unified. We find ourselves repeatedly struggling to correct narratives we cannot control, as interviews are edited and meanings are reshaped. The sense of cohesion that once held everything together begins to break apart.

Outside, the world becomes more polarized. Volunteers experience hostility on the streets. Some lose their jobs after being filmed. Communities divide sharply along political lines. The act of hanging posters, once urgent and clear, begins to feel repetitive, uncertain, almost powerless. We continue, but something essential has shifted. We are both exhausted and unable to stop, caught inside momentum that no longer feels fully ours.

Then things become personal. Our apartment is broken into. Nothing is taken, but something nebulous changes. The feeling of safety becomes even more tenuous. Threats continue. Isolation deepens. During a dinner with a new friend, we meet a well-known medium who unexpectedly describes details of our apartment and warns us that we are in imminent danger. Whether or not we fully believe what is said, something in us responds. That night, we pack our belongings and leave. From that moment on, we live in motion.

We move from apartment to apartment, staying with friends, carrying our belongings, our work, and campaign materials with us. We stay only in buildings featuring doormen, cameras, locked entrances. Stability becomes temporary by design.

We continue working through instability. We give interviews. We speak publicly. We move forward even when we are exhausted. Life becomes a series of extremes. In the streets, we are met with both gratitude and hostility. Some people embrace us, cry with us, thank us. Others curse us or turn away angrily. Former colleagues distance themselves or speak against us publicly. At the same time, families of hostages ask us not to stop. To survive financially, we begin creating smaller artworks for supporters, returning to the very practice that first connected us. 

Over time, the campaign loses visibility. Public attention wanders. Posters remain only as fragments on walls, weathered and partially vandalized. We begin to feel as though we are disappearing from the story we helped write, while others continue to use its language without acknowledging its origins. Exhaustion turns into disappointment, and disappointment into a quieter sense of betrayal. Eventually, we briefly return to Israel to settle up the life we had left behind. We sell, donate, and release what remains. After that, we do not return in the same way again. We attempt to rebuild in the United States.

Slowly, we return to art, not as urgency, but as a means of processing events and emotions. A filmmaker begins to document the broader phenomenon of poster tearing and the social fracture it reflects, placing fragments of our experience inside a wider cultural narrative. We continue to speak publicly about the hostages in screenings and panels, even as our own visibility fades. The campaign becomes less a living movement and more a memory, a trace of a moment when attention and urgency briefly aligned. Still, we keep going.

We decide to try one more round of fertility treatments, in spite of everything we have lost. We travel, we wait, we hope, we endure uncertainty again. Eventually, something shifts. We succeed. A long-awaited pregnancy. 

By this point, all the hostages, whether on their feet, on crutches, or in body bags, have come home. The larger conflict in the world has not ended, and instability remains present everywhere we look. What remains is a question that continues to echo through all that we have lived: How do we keep choosing life, love, and creation in a world that so often pulls toward destruction?

There was no single moment when I decided to establish a civil commission. There was certainly no plan in place. As I watched history being rewritten in real time, before Israelis could even begin to grasp what was happening, I knew something had occurred that would demand more from me than anything I had ever imagined.

As a legal scholar, a feminist, and a human rights advocate, my academic work had long been concerned with gender, international law, and the protection of women’s rights in times of crisis. I believed deeply in the architecture we had built around victims: international human rights institutions, feminist jurisprudence, the painstaking progress that had taught the world to recognize sexual violence not as an inevitable byproduct of war, but as a grave violation demanding recognition and accountability. Then came the October 7 massacre.

In the days that followed, I began receiving accounts of unimaginable violence. Women murdered. Families slaughtered or burned together. People abducted from their homes. Sexual violence. Bodies bearing signs of horrific abuse. The terrorists had filmed and livestreamed the attack, glorifying what they had done and using their victims’ phones and social media accounts to amplify the suffering. Seeing the rampage, I thought the institutions I had grown to trust and rely on would respond with urgency and compassion. I expected urgent actions for the return of the hostages, solidarity with the victims, and acknowledgement of the pain, trauma, and grief. 

What I did not anticipate was that almost immediately, we would have to fight over whether the violence itself—especially the sexual violence—could be established as fact. But within days, a second battle had begun: a battle over the truth.

Victims’ accounts were questioned. Evidence was dismissed. Testimonies were politicized. Even images recorded by the perpetrators themselves became objects of denial or relativization. The sexual violence itself quickly became a tool for political agendas by those who were entrusted with protecting human rights. 

For those of us who had spent years working on gender and sexual violence, this was a devastating violation of responsibility and it challenged one of our deepest assumptions: that the protection of victims of sexual violence transcend politics. The belief system that had shaped our values had fractured at its core. The moral and legal frameworks I had trusted had broken beneath my feet. We were not operating in a sympathetic evidentiary environment. We were not even operating in a neutral one. Though we couldn’t explain it, something was profoundly wrong. 

Seeing all of this, I remember asking publicly, very early after the attack, a question I never imagined that I would ever ask: Does international law apply to Israeli women? Is it going to protect us?  

That may have been my Hineni moment. 

Not because I felt ready, but because I understood that waiting for someone else to act was no longer an option. And so, together with extraordinary colleagues, we established the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.

At first, the task seemed straightforward: to collect and document every piece of available information. But very quickly, we understood that documentation itself had become part of the struggle. We were witnessing atrocities and bearing testimony to trauma that at times made us physically ill, while simultaneously confronting organized and sophisticated efforts to deny the evidence.

I understood that anti-Semitism does not operate only through the hatred of Jews. It operates at the level of perception. It introduces instability at the level of knowledge itself, affecting whose testimony is recognized, which victims are believed, what evidence is considered credible, which suffering is granted moral significance, and ultimately which stories become part of history.

For someone shaped by feminist legal theory, this was particularly painful. For decades, feminist activists fought to establish that victims of sexual violence deserve to be heard and believed; that their trauma can shape testimony; that disbelief can itself become another form of harm.

And yet, I watched those principles become conditional and fragile. Jewish and Israeli victims were questioned, doubted, and asked to cross impossible evidentiary thresholds that seemed to keep moving. 

In that sense, preserving the factual record was not merely a legal exercise. It was an act of resistance. An epistemic resistance. A feminist resistance. A humanistic resistance.

And so, we listened to survivors and their families. We gathered testimonies, photographs, videos, open-source evidence, and other records. We analyzed everything: watching the excruciating materials over and over again and working with lawyers, researchers, and experts from around the world to build an archive not merely for the current moment, but for future generations. Knowing that every factual assertion would be challenged, we adopted rigorous legal methodologies, extensive corroboration, multidisciplinary reviews, and standards drawn from international criminal investigations. That rigor was not only a matter of good legal practice. It was a response to an environment in which truth itself had become contested, and in which every witness, every survivor, and even we ourselves had become targets. That rigor culminated in our published report, Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled—The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity, which provides the most comprehensive legal and factual foundation for understanding Hamas’s crimes.

But as we worked on the report, our attention was drawn to another aspect of the massacre we had yet to consider. We saw families deliberately attacked and tortured as families: parents murdered before their children’s eyes, children harmed before their parents’ eyes, relatives abducted together and intentionally separated, homes turned into sites of torture, and familial bonds themselves weaponized to maximize suffering. They could have killed everyone. Instead, they chose to weaponize familial love itself and to inflict such suffering on victims that would endure long after the violence had ended, ensuring that the pain would be carried by survivors for generations. 

Survivors’ experiences exceeded the vocabulary available to us, forcing us to expand our language. What we were witnessing demanded new words. To describe it, we coined the terms Kinocide—the systematic targeting and destruction of families and the weaponization of the bonds between their members. And I offer the term kinocidal sexual violence—to describe sexual violence deliberately committed through, against, or in the presence of family members to weaponize the most intimate of human bonds. By giving victims—and the law—the language to describe what had been done to them, we gave them the ability to articulate their suffering and, perhaps for the first time, to feel truly seen and understood.

Someone recently asked me whether, after everything we’ve documented—the evidence, the testimonies, the patterns of violence, the legal analysis—there was anything missing from our report. The question stayed with me. Nearly 300 pages long, there is still one line I wish I could add. A line that I want my children to know. A line that I want survivors and families to know. A line I need to be reminded of myself after years of looking directly at what human beings are capable of doing to one another: Always, always remember that there is as much good in this world as there is evil. Cruelty is real, but so are courage, love, compassion, and the goodness that people are capable of. I have seen that, too.

I have seen it in survivors who chose to speak up. I have seen it in families who entrusted us with the most painful chapters of their lives. I have seen it in colleagues who stayed even when the work became almost unbearable. I have seen it in people across countries, professions, religions, and communities who stood with us and refused to look away.

In that sense, for me, the Hineni moment was a moment of calling. What gave it meaning, however, was everything that followed.  It was the decision to remain, to keep showing up, and to continue answering that call day after day. To speak for those who cannot. To stand by the truth even when it becomes uncomfortable, or unbearable. To stay with victims long after the world has grown tired of their stories and to preserve memory when forgetting is simply easier. And lastly, to defend our shared humanity precisely when cruelty and ignorance tempted us to abandon it. Perhaps that is what it truly means to say, hineni: not simply to answer the call, but to remain faithful to it.

The October 7 massacre taught me that truth sometimes requires fierce protection. It does not preserve itself. Human rights do not defend themselves. Institutions do not automatically live up to the principles they proclaim. They depend on people willing to stand up and say, “I see what is happening. I refuse to look away. I will carry what I can.”

Here I am.

Hineni.

Though my detractors wouldn’t put it that way, I was cancelled for daring to suggest that Jews may defend themselves against attempted genocide. During the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, I wrote a Facebook post defending Israel’s blockade of Hamas-run Gaza, comparing the situation to someone who, threatened by a rabid dog, places it in a cage to protect himself only to be condemned for the dog’s furious barking. Capturing what I saw as the absurdity of much of the world’s response to Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the analogy portrayed the dog as being violent not because it was in the cage, but rather placed in the cage because of the relentless violence it had inflicted while unconfined.

Six months later, long after the war ended, my post was sinisterly twisted into something it was never meant to be: an expression of racism against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in general.  Condemnation quickly followed—from people I had once considered my friends through strangers around the globe. Petitions circulated branding me a hateful, racist Zionist and demanding that I be fired, removed, silenced. Hate mail and death threats poured in from all over the world. After my personal information was shared online, my family and I lived in constant fear and paranoia. Even dropping off our young boys at their Jewish day school became an exercise in terror as the attacks continued for weeks on end. 

The public campaign soon threatened to become a private collapse. I went on medical leave, partly to avoid being seen in public and exposing myself to potential attacks. For weeks, I could barely function. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep. I stayed up all night defending myself—writing emails, explaining that I was the target of a coordinated defamation campaign, trying to rally support, speaking with lawyers and journalists, giving interviews, and talking to anyone who would listen.

On the cusp of a nervous collapse, the campaign was taking its toll. I felt as though I were leaning over in my chair just a little too far, forever catching myself before I fell, inching closer and closer to the moment when I would tumble over the precipice. I thought about giving up. I thought about surrendering, letting people call me—and any other proud Jew—a racist, and then retreating into silence. The chair, I felt, kept tipping. 

Then something unexpected happened. Someone started a petition in my support, and it began to spread. Going viral, it went around the world, ultimately garnering more than 10,000 signatures—even more than the petitions calling for my dismissal. At that moment, something clicked. The chair was righted.

When you are attacked in the way I was and nearly everyone you know turns against you, you feel profoundly alone. It was as though everyone I knew had suddenly pulled off their masks and revealed a Hitler face beneath. In that loneliness, the easiest and most tempting thing was to give up, give in, and capitulate. Instead, that petition reminded me that I was not alone. It showed me that more than 10,000 people around the world stood behind me and with me. Realizing that, in some way, I represented these people—that while I was the Jew currently under attack, it really was all Jews on trial—I understood that I must not, indeed could not, let them down. I may have been the tip of the spear, but they were the ten thousand pushing it forward.

Moments away from collapse, from giving up, I stood back up. With the truth on my side, that petition convinced me that I had no choice but to keep fighting. And I have ever since. From that moment on, my academic and professional work became increasingly devoted to defending Israel and the Jewish people, both on campuses and beyond. It could so easily have ended differently. Yet, when I was at my very lowest, Am Yisrael stood up for me. And so now, I stand up for them.

I never could have imagined that one decision to seek justice for myself would lead me to a completely new community, cause, and purpose. What began as a deeply personal journey toward healing and accountability would eventually connect me to something much larger than myself.

In November 2005, when I was 15-years-old, I was sexually assaulted. Though the crime was reported to law enforcement, my parents did not want to pursue criminal charges. And, since I was a minor at the time, the case did not move forward. Nearly 18 years later, having seen a video posted on social media by another survivor of sexual assault, I finally got the push I needed to reopen my case and pursue justice once again.

Protected by the extension of the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse—in Connecticut, victims can seek justice until thirty years after reaching adulthood, when they turn 48-years-old—I made the decision to revisit a chapter of my life that I had carried with me for nearly two decades. By March 2024, the police investigation was complete, and the detective assigned to my case had applied for an arrest warrant against the perpetrator. He was exceptional to work with and, despite the passage of nearly two decades and the absence of DNA evidence, was able to uncover sufficient evidence to move the case forward. For the first time in years, I felt like justice might finally be within reach. 

That same month, my attention was drawn to another story of trauma and the search for justice. Posting about the hostages kidnapped into Gaza during the October 7 massacre, a Jewish friend shared information about their plight on social media, and it immediately captured my attention. Less than three months later, I joined the Run for Their Lives chapter in Fairfield, Connecticut, part of a global initiative of more than 230 groups advocating for the release of the hostages. At the time, I expected it to be a one-time gesture of solidarity as a Christian ally. Instead, I found myself returning almost every week, missing only a handful of walks between June 2024 and October 2025 when the last remaining living hostages were finally brought back home.

Run for Their Lives ended up changing my life just as profoundly as my own pursuit of justice. I never anticipated that a weekly walk would become one of the most meaningful and transformative experiences of my life, but from the very first gathering I was struck by the warmth, gratitude, and kindness of the people involved. I felt an overwhelming sense of compassion, hope, love, and connection, and knew that this community was different from the many other I have been a part of throughout my life. 

By the time I pulled into my driveway after that first walk, one of the group leaders had already sent me a friend request on social media. Feeling welcomed and seen, I returned the following week, and the one after that, and the one after that. Over time, I came to know all three group leaders—Beth, Lauren, and Laurie—whose kindness, dedication, and commitment helped create the incredible community I had found.

Shortly after I began participating in the walks, I started following the personal stories of the hostages more closely. As I learned about their experiences, I discovered that many had endured sexual abuse while in captivity. Several men, women, and children who survived captivity courageously stepped forward to share their stories, telling of harrowing experiences no one should ever have to endure. As additional hostages were gradually released, more accounts emerged through news articles, documentaries, and television interviews. Their stories resonated with me in ways I was only beginning to understand.

Though I was already deeply committed to advocating for the hostages, learning that some had experienced sexual violence created an even stronger personal connection for me. As a survivor myself, I understood how difficult it can be to speak publicly about such trauma. I knew that telling your story often means reliving some of your most painful moments. And yet, the released hostages refused to stay silent. Their courage in sharing their experiences only strengthened my resolve to stand beside them and help ensure that their stories would never be forgotten.

One aspect of the fight to release the hostages rang painfully familiar. Having experienced skepticism, judgment, and misunderstanding about my own assault, I noticed that both the hostages and those calling for their release often faced similar hostility. Despite advocating for the release of innocent people who had endured unimaginable suffering, the movement was frequently misunderstood, criticized, or accused of motives that did not reflect its purpose. Even the hostages themselves, held for months in underground tunnels, separated from their families, deprived of basic comforts, and subjected to profound physical and emotional trauma, often saw their experiences dismissed, minimized, or questioned. The more I learned about their stories, the more deeply committed I became to ensuring that their experiences—and their humanity—remained at the center of the conversation.

My own experience navigating the criminal justice system also exposed me to the many challenges survivors face in seeking justice. Working alongside advocates and activists to support legislative changes that would better serve survivors, I learned about Jane Doe No More, a Connecticut-based organization dedicated to the prevention of sexual violence through education, awareness, and survivor empowerment. By then, my involvement with Run for Their Lives had given me the confidence and strength to speak publicly about my own experience. The friendships I made through both communities reminded me that advocacy often requires courage, persistence, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. Watching the example set by my newfound friends, I learned that meaningful change often begins when people find the courage to use their voices.

Years ago, I never would have imagined speaking publicly about my experiences, let alone doing so on a regular basis. Today, as one of 72 Survivor Speakers with Jane Doe No More, sharing my story has become a powerful part of my healing journey while also creating opportunities to educate others and support fellow survivors.

The experiences I endured have changed me, but they did not define the limits of my life. Instead, they became the reason I continue to speak, stand with others, and fight for a world where survivors are believed, hostages are fought for, and people who have gone through unimaginable trauma are met with kindness, understanding, and compassion. Looking back, I could never have imagined where standing up for myself would lead. Yet, what began as a decision to seek justice for myself became a journey that connected me with communities, causes, and people who would transform my life.

My journey as a survivor taught me that healing is not a straight line. Sometimes healing looks like returning to the hardest moments of your life. Sometimes it looks like standing beside others in their darkest moments. Sometimes it looks like finding the courage to say, “Hineni”—here I am.

I do not know what my next “Hineni” moment will be, but I know that the next time I am called to stand up, speak out, and show up for others, I will be ready to answer: 

Here I am.

Hineni.

I have always taken the road less travelled.

My mother was raised in an Orthodox home. Her parents, both immigrants, owned a Kosher restaurant, Poliacoff’s, in midtown Manhattan. My parents separated when I was young and I was raised by a black stepfather for many of my formative years. I dropped out of high school but read voraciously while my peers attended class. I studied Buddhism for years as a teenager, sitting through meditation retreats while others my age were out partying. I was searching for something I couldn’t put words to. 

That search unexpectedly led me to Israel when, in 2001, my non-Jewish best friend convinced me to join him on a trip there. Though I had never set foot in the country before, I immediately felt at home in a way I never had elsewhere. Seeing kids my age serving in the military illuminated the differences between the youth in America and Israel. In Israel, young people weren’t only prepared to give away three years of their lives, they were willing to put their lives on the line to keep others safe. My friend and I traveled through Israel, the Palestinian territories, the Sinai, and Egypt before heading to Europe on the very day the Second Intifada began. Returning to the U.S. to start college, I never could have imagined that that journey had quietly set the course for the next two decades of my life.

Almost immediately, the questions raised by that trip followed me into the classroom. During my first week as a student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I sat in a coffee shop, watching as the second plane hit the World Trade Center on live TV. In my Middle Eastern History seminar, which included, among other students, an Iraqi Kurd, a Pashtun Afghan woman, Christians of various traditions, and me as the only Jew, we tried making sense of that tragedy. A Muslim classmate expressed a deep fear of being blamed for the attacks. His anxiety is something that has stayed with me.

The events of September 11, 2001, and my experiences in Israel both deepened my relationship with Judaism despite my staunch secularism. Inspired by the carnage of the Second Intifada to better understand the tribe I belonged to and the violence directed at Israeli civilians, I decided, in the summer before my sophomore year, to do something I never could have imagined doing just a couple years earlier. And so, despite widespread protests from friends and family, I moved to Israel. I made Aliyah.

Beyond the blessing of meeting and marrying my wife during my time in Israel, the years I spent in the country gave me something I hadn’t even known I was missing: a sense of Jewish peoplehood. Coming to understand that no matter where I am in the world there will always be a Shabbat table I could join and people who care about my well-being before we’ve ever met imbued me with a new kind of power. Communicating in the language of my ancestors with my distant cousins whose families came from across the Middle East, North Africa, Ethiopia, and Europe felt like a newfound superpower. 

After five years in Israel, my wife and I crossed the Atlantic once again and settled in New York City in 2008. We focused on graduate school, then our burgeoning careers, and eventually raising children. Aside from volunteering briefly with the Community Security Services, joining a Synagogue to register our children in a Jewish daycare, and maintaining close friendships with New York’s Israeli community, we were relatively disconnected from organized American Jewish communal life. 

That changed forever on October 7, 2023.

Waking up earlier than usual to drive our sons to their respective soccer tournaments, my wife and I noticed hundreds of unread messages on her family WhatsApp group. We read through them together, listening to voice note after voice note with tears running down our cheeks, learning that some of her family members were trapped inside their homes on kibbutzim overrun by Hamas. Some had watched their neighbors being murdered. Others begged for help as they hid inside homes that were partially on fire, Hamas terrorists trying to smoke them out. In a matter of minutes, the ordinary life we had spent years building in New York City no longer felt ordinary at all.

Still in shock, my wife and I kissed each other goodbye and drove in opposite directions. Praying for family members we hadn’t heard from yet, I stood on the field’s sidelines cheering for my son as the death toll kept rising. 50 dead. Then 100 dead. Then more, many more. My mind was taking in the horror thousands of miles away, even as my body appeared to move normally through the familiar routines.

But the devastation of the October 7 Massacre was only the beginning. Upon returning home, I learned that the Democratic Socialists of America—a radical, anti-Israel political organization—had put together a rally in Times Square in celebration of the massacre. On Monday, my wife’s colleagues at the Brooklyn public school where she worked avoided her because she was Israeli. I learned the name of my city Councilwoman, Shahana Hanif, when I read about her arrest on October 20 during an anti-Israel rally. The message from our community was unmistakable. Rather than responding with horror, many seemed intent on justifying or even glorifying the massacre.

In the weeks that followed, I operated in a daze. All around me, hostage posters were torn down as fast as we could put them up. By the end of October, activists began to gather outside of my own grocery cooperative, the Park Slope Food Coop, to gather signatures for a petition to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel. I was furious. Not just at the proposal, but at the activists who had taken to accosting members outside the entrance, spreading anti-Zionist libels and treating the word “Zionist” (someone who believes in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland) as a slur. People called me a racist genocide supporter. Some repeated delusionally inflated casualty figures, claiming that 700,000 Palestinians had been killed. Others insisted Hamas hadn’t intended to harm civilians. Faced with activists whose cult-like certainty seemed impervious to evidence or argument, meaningful conversation felt impossible. One Israeli friend was screamed at while stocking shelves by a woman who told her she “smelled of Palestinian baby blood.” Had a white coop member screamed something comparable at a black member, expulsion would have been immediate and unanimous. Heartbreakingly, the coop’s tepid response led us all to the same conclusion: when it came to Jews, the rules were different.

Dismayed that people weren’t willing to take an active stand against this hatred, I decided to run for the Coop’s Board of Directors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I lost the election by a wide margin, which only grew my resolve. Bolstered by the fact that so many people privately expressed to me how happy they were that I was decrying the boycott attempt and its corrosive effects on our community, my urge to stand up to anti-Zionism was more acute than ever.

Turning my attention to Shahana Hanif, my City Council member who had visited Columbia’s anti-Israel encampments, tweeted “Globalize the Intifada,” and refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist or condemn Hamas, I joined a group of similarly reluctant local activists.  Organizing in people’s living rooms, I formed a broad coalition of many of Hanif’s Jewish and non-Jewish constituents who were troubled by her conduct, to co-found Brooklyn Bridgebuilders, a truly local, grassroots organization dedicated to confronting hatred in all its forms. What began as outrage over one elected official quickly became an effort to rebuild the kind of community we wanted to live in.

Alongside my newfound activism, I worked with the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights legal advocacy organization, to file a discrimination complaint against the Park Slope Food Coop with the New York State Human Rights Commission. If the coop wouldn’t stand against anti-Zionist hatred, I would ask the courts to. If my Council member was promoting anti-Zionist hate speech, I would ask voters to hold her accountable. Raising money, training volunteers, and organizing the community, the pressure we built gradually worked, forcing Hanif to condemn an attack on a local Jewish-owned restaurant, delete some of her inflammatory tweets, and speak more critically of Hamas. For the first time, I saw that even ordinary citizens could influence public life when they organized, persisted, and refused to be intimidated.

Unfortunately, not every fight ended the same way. As Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign gathered momentum, it became increasingly clear that Hanif would comfortably win reelection. Then, in April 2025, the stakes at the coop snapped back into sharp focus when a member declared, to sustained applause, that “Jewish supremacy is a real problem in this country.” Although I took the stage to challenge the room, by then the outcome already felt inevitable. The following month, the coop voted to boycott Israel. 

Everything in my life has prepared me for this moment. At sixteen, I dropped out of school to pave my own path. At twenty-one, I made Aliyah when everyone told me not to. At twenty-eight, I founded my own business in the midst of a global financial crisis. Time and again, I have learned that the right path is often the uncomfortable one. Today I’m a little wiser, a little more stubborn, and infinitely more certain that Am Yisrael has my back. 

Here I am.

Hineni.

History is often transformed by moments that, at first glance, seem too modest to matter. A woman refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. A young pastor urging a wounded community to confront injustice without violence. A human rights activist deciding that a forgotten comic book deserves a second life in another language. Because such moments rarely announce themselves as revolutionary, their power lies precisely in their ordinariness. Only later do we recognize that each marked the beginning of a larger moral and political awakening. For me, that moment began in 2006 with an unexpected encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in a comic book from the 1960s.

When I first read Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, I never imagined it would alter the trajectory of my life. Recounting Rosa Parks’s story, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, its language was simple, its format accessible, and its moral message unmistakably human. Yet what moved me most was not King’s courage or Parks’ quiet defiance, but the comprehension that neither regarded themselves as heroic. They had simply reached a point at which silence was no longer morally possible.

For the first time, I understood that history is rarely changed by extraordinary people or Marvel superheroes. More often, change begins with ordinary individuals who accept extraordinary responsibility. That was my first encounter with the idea Jews call Hineni, not merely as a declaration of presence but as an ethical response to a demand that can no longer be evaded.

At the time, I was a young human rights activist working to advance liberal democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights under an authoritarian regime. Though many young Egyptians believed that meaningful political change was impossible, I knew that our deepest challenge was not political repression alone but the widespread conviction that change was only possible through violence. Having learned from Dr. King a different grammar for political struggle, I came to understand that moral courage could become political power without sacrificing human dignity.

Convinced that my fellow Egyptians deserved to encounter that vision as well, I worked with the American Islamic Congress—a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit—to translate the comic book into Arabic and print it, not without risk, at an underground Cairo print shop. With Egyptian authorities questioning why an American comic book about civil rights should be published in Arabic, I spent hours explaining that this was not an American story alone but a universal account of citizenship, responsibility, and peaceful resistance. Eventually, thousands of copies of the comic book were printed and distributed across the Middle East. Even before the book reached the streets, it had already demonstrated the persuasive power of dialogue over confrontation.

At the time, I believed I was just translating a comic book. Only later did I understand that I was translating an idea, one that would inspire millions of young people in Egypt, the Middle East, and the entire world to stand up for themselves. Spearheading the Egyptian “Arab Spring,” I was present at the forefront when hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens filled Tahrir Square in January, 2011. After days of sustained protests, I saw that idea come to life in a nonviolent revolution that successfully ousted a hardline dictator and paved the way for a democracy to emerge in our political landscape.

Like millions of others, I believed we were witnessing the birth of a democratic Egypt. For eighteen unforgettable days, our differences in religion, ideology, class, and gender seemed to dissolve into a shared demand for freedom, dignity, and an accountable government. Among the crowds, copies of the comic book I had translated were passed from hand to hand. With international media later reporting that the Arabic edition had helped introduce young Egyptian activists to the philosophy of nonviolent resistance, playing a role in bringing that small book from Montgomery to Cairo remains one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

Like many Egyptians, I believed that removing Hosni Mubarak from power would be the hardest part. I was wrong. Building democracy proved far more difficult than demanding one. As the old regime collapsed and many young revolutionaries found themselves debating constitutional principles, independent institutions, civil liberties, and the rule of law, members of the Muslim Brotherhood were gearing up for the coming elections, consolidating their organization, and positioning themselves to dominate the new political order. While we were trying our best to build democratic institutions, they were preparing to capture them.

Surprised that so many respected journalists, academics, and policymakers in the West concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in a democratic election made the organization itself democratic, I refused to accept that logic. Having spent years studying political Islam (a politicized, radicalized adaptation of the religion of Islam widely promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, including Hamas), I understood that democracy cannot be reduced to the ballot box, nor judged solely by the outcome of an election. True democracy requires constitutional limits on power, the protection of minorities, freedom of expression, judicial independence, and the willingness of political actors to accept losses peacefully. Without these principles, as my fellow citizens would soon discover, elections can become the most efficient route to a new authoritarianism.

No longer able to remain silent as democracy was misunderstood by both its enemies and many of its admirers, I began writing and speaking more openly about the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological ambitions. I warned that replacing one authoritarian system with another would betray the revolution’s aspirations. I continued criticizing human rights violations by the Egyptian state because I believed that liberty loses its meaning when applied selectively. Very quickly, I discovered that intellectual consistency is often the loneliest political position. Considered an enemy by Islamists for challenging their power and viewed with suspicion by the opposition for refusing to excuse authoritarianism in the name of stability, I belonged to neither camp.

Years later, on October 7, 2023, I faced a defining moral test that every generation must eventually confront. As Hamas carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, much of the public conversation across the Middle East celebrated or justified the attack. Friends whom I had known for years defended the murder of civilians as legitimate resistance. Others chose silence. For me, there was no dilemma. 

The principles that had first inspired me through the story of King and Parks left me with only one possible response. If terrorism against civilians is wrong in Cairo, then it must be equally wrong in Jerusalem. If human dignity is universal, then it cannot depend on the nationality, religion, or ethnicity of the victim. Principles cease to be principles the moment they become conditional.

I used my platform to explain to my fellow Arabs exactly what had happened on that day and demonstrating the breakdown of morals that was entailed for such a blatantly cruel massacre to take place. Telling the truth about the October 7 massacre changed my life forever. Overnight, I became the target of an unprecedented campaign of threats and incitement, eventually forcing me to leave my country and cutting me off from my roots just in order to survive. Facing the risk of being killed by extremists who declared me “an ally of the Jews” or being imprisoned by a government that accused me of “high treason” and “adopting Zionism,” I was so lucky to find another home in “the land of the free”—the land of King, Parks, Washington, and Jefferson—where I adopted the fight against anti-Semitism as my latest Hineni cause. 

Looking back, I no longer see Hineni as a single moment but as a way of life. I now see it as the quiet realization that once we recognize the truth, we inherit the responsibility to defend it. Sometimes that responsibility begins with translating a comic book. Sometimes it means standing in a public square. Sometimes it means speaking when nearly everyone around you wishes you would stay silent.

I could never have imagined that a story that began on a bus in Montgomery would one day shape my journey from Cairo to Washington. Rosa Parks taught me that courage begins with refusing to surrender one’s seat. Martin Luther King Jr. taught me that moral conviction can move societies. Egypt taught me that democracy requires more than elections. October 7, 2023 taught me that principles either apply universally or they are not principles at all. That, for me, is the meaning of Hineni. It is not standing up because one is fearless. It is standing up because conscience has left no other choice.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Every family has an origin story. Ours began when Daphne was six or seven years old and someone gave her a stationery set, complete with pretend stamps. Around that time, Daphne first learned of the persecution of Jews and Christians in the Soviet Union. In her childish hand, riddled with spelling mistakes, she began writing letters “to the Russian leaders.” Let the Jewish people go, she implored. Let the Christians go.

Of course, Daphne had no idea how letters reached governments. She knew nothing of addresses, embassies, or consulates. She simply sealed each letter in an envelope, attached her pretend stamp, and proudly dropped it in the mailbox. 

Thinking this would teach her an early lesson about being “careful,” one adult warned Daphne that “if you keep writing those letters, the Russians will come and get you.” Undeterred, she gathered every remaining sheet of paper, every envelope, and every stamp. In the biggest letters she could write, she scrawled across each one: LET THEM GO! 

She mailed every single one.

We are not a Jewish family, and though Daphne did not know the word then, we believe that was our family’s first Hinenimoment—the fearless response of a child. Etched into her heart, that childish determination became a simple, wholehearted “yes.” Over time, that “yes” became the defining response of our family and, later, of our organization. 

There was nothing remarkable about our beginnings. We were a homeless single-parent family, overcoming day to day, with no ambition beyond our own survival and no vision beyond our own community. Then, one Sunday, while Daphne was sitting quietly in church, an American woman approached her and invited her to speak at a church in the United States.  

We had never travelled internationally, had no experience, and certainly no resources. Plenty of nights we went to sleep not knowing how we would find the money to manage through the following day. But the answer was Hineni. Daphne would step on the stage, speak from the heart, and invite people to discover their purpose and calling in life. We would simply say “yes” and discover along the way whether the impossible was, in fact, possible.

That single response opened a door that has never really closed. Taking us where we would never naturally have gone, leading us to people we would never have met, and bringing us to more than forty nations, that “yes” has placed us in life-threatening danger. We have faced terrorist threats in Indonesia, police raids in Malaysia, hijack attempts in Hong Kong and Côte d’Ivoire, machete attacks, wars, and other dangerous situations. Yet, that “yes” has also brought more blessing and purpose into our lives than we could ever have imagined. Eventually becoming the very heartbeat of our family and our organization—Generation 2 Generation—that “yes” inspired our goal of raising a generation that will discover its own Hineni as a lifelong response.

When a tsunami ravaged Southeast Asia in December 2004, we gathered a team and traveled within days to Thailand to help clear the devastation and rescue the local communities whose lives had been shattered. We built a base of operations where hundreds of volunteers would fly into help, provide medical services and food, and help restore and provide new boats to kickstart the local economy. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, we went immediately to clear homes that had been under water, mobilizing some of the volunteers we trained in Thailand to provide food and supplies to struggling families. When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and thousands of local men and women targeted by the Taliban desperately sought to escape from what they described as a seemingly impossible situation, Andrew worked to test the boundaries of the impossible and helped rescue more than 300 people. When we learned of the horrific plague of human trafficking devastating vulnerable women, Daniella, Daphne’s daughter and Andrew’s sister, began faithfully traveling into some of Thailand’s darkest corners, helping rescue girls who had become trapped there.

What we have learned from willingly entering the places most people do everything in their power to avoid, is that we cannot control the outcome, only our response. Today, that response is no longer a whisper. It has become our declaration.

Then came the greatest test of that commitment. On October 7, 2023, while many governments around the world were frantically organizing evacuation flights to bring their citizens home from Israel, we were determined to move in the opposite direction: instead of fleeing from danger, we ran toward it. Our response was immediate. “Comfort, comfort My people.” No money for our flights? We would find it. War? That did not change our answer. Less than two weeks after the massacre, our first team of volunteers landed in Israel. Hineni had carried us this far. We saw no reason to answer differently now.

Since then, we have mobilized seven teams to serve throughout the country. Whether walking the streets of Jerusalem simply to stand alongside the people of Israel, volunteering on farms in the Golan Heights, cooking for young soldiers at Gilat Junction, comforting grieving children and elderly survivors, or showing up wherever we were needed, we have carried with us one simple message: “You are not alone.” Though not Jewish, in this age of growing anti-Semitism, we have chosen to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters with even greater conviction.

People sometimes ask how we manage to be so brave. The truth is that we are not. We are ordinary, fragile people. We wrestle with fears, distractions, weaknesses, and competing priorities just like anyone else. And yet, for us, not coming to people’s aid would have been harder. Not saying Hineni would have been far more difficult than saying it. 

Hineni is not a ritual, but a reminder of who we are. Every time we say it, that response becomes a little more deeply woven into our lives. Wherever we are needed, we will be there.

Because here we are.

Hinenu.

On October 8, 2023, a lightning bolt, cartoonish in nature, ran its violent course from my scalp to my toes. It was not a call to prayer, but rather a call to assignment. An appointment from above to use my gift to bear witness, to document, to archive the deadliest day against Jews since the Holocaust.

The jolt felt strangely familiar, as though I had been waiting for it my entire life. As though up until that moment, I had simply been waiting for my commander’s nod. I wasn’t choosing a path so much as recognizing one had arrived. It was time. The ancestors had called. It became the moment my life changed forever. The moment I went from being universally liked to becoming a liability. The moment the version of me everyone knew ended, and a version no one was prepared for began. In a split second, I understood instinctively that my current life—as a Jew, as a woman, as an artist—was over.

As a veteran of New York City’s spoken word scene—a scene deeply intertwined with social justice activism—I had spent decades using my art to speak out against racism, inequality, and injustice. While I often used my voice to confront wrongs directed at other marginalized communities, I was also one of the first Jewish poets to unapologetically center Jewish pride, challenge anti-Semitism, and give voice to an urban Jewish girl who defied stereotypes. I was a feel-good bridge builder, weaving comedy, grit, and poignancy into stories that celebrated the kaleidoscope of New York City. This was the world that raised me. It is who I am.

I grew up on the old Upper West Side in a liberal, Democratic household. My parents were public school teachers in the Bronx who walked around carrying PBS Channel 13 tote bags. My P.S. 166 class photo was a vibrant mix of Jews, Latinos, and African Americans who listened to The Sugarhill Gang on vinyl. Raised on a steady diet of racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ pride, I was taught that you don’t define other minorities’ struggles for them. You listen when they tell you what they’re experiencing.

Throughout my years as a spoken word artist, I had also managed, almost instinctively, to steer clear of the one issue that could unravel it all: Israel. The message was implicit: Liberals—please check your Zionism at the door. Openly supporting or celebrating Israel wasn’t part of the community’s script. I would never check the anti-Israel box, but somehow, I had managed to build a career celebrating my Jewish identity while leaving my convictions about Israel off the page.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

There was one event that, in hindsight, foreshadowed my lightning-bolt moment. In 2012, after discovering I had worked for Birthright Israel, a group of Palestinian activists on Facebook declared me a “Zionist infiltrator” and protested my being featured at a venue in Washington Heights. Fortunately for me, “Zionist” had not yet become the social media slur it later would. Most of my colleagues were simply confused by the accusation and uninterested in the controversy. The outrage fizzled almost as quickly as it had begun.

But that was then, and this was now.

Now, my assignment would require a kind of public controversy I’d never known. The version of me that had survived by reaching out and building bridges would no longer be enough for what lay ahead. This new life demanded different tools. It demanded armor—and a kind of strength I had never been asked to summon.

My weapons would be words. Words that challenged the growing narrative casting Jews as nothing more than white colonial settlers, erasing our identity as an indigenous people with deep historical ties to the land of Israel. Words that told the stories of my grandparents, Syrian Jews, who were among the more than 800,000 Jews expelled or forced to flee Arab lands. Words that confronted a narrative which, in some circles, had become a way to justify—or excuse—the atrocities Hamas had committed against us. With nothing left to do but hunker down, sharpen and polish my weapons, I prepared as the community around me disintegrated. There are images from those first days now permanently seared into my psyche: Naama Levy’s bloodied sweatpants. The Black Lives Matter Chicago paraglider post. A flyer advertising a spoken word fundraiser for Gaza, containing no mention of the Israeli hostages. The image of Shani Louk’s body being paraded through the streets of Gaza.

I posted the Israeli flag, photos of hostages, and tributes to slain kibbutzniks. Every post felt like the intertwining of danger and destiny. I watched other warriors—people I believed had been summoned by the same unseen force—bravely defy the unraveling, hateful anti-Israel narrative. I knew I was next on the front line.

On October 12, 2023—my birthday—at 8:30 a.m., I watched a woman furiously rip down hostage posters right next to my daughter’s elementary school. I stood frozen and said nothing.

That evening, over celebratory drinks with five non-Jewish friends, I huddled over my cocktail, dumbfounded that everyone at the table looked so functional. So whole. We were living in completely different universes.

On October 15, at a pro-Palestinian rally at Cornell University, a history professor said of the October 7 attack, “It was exhilarating. It was energizing… I was exhilarated.” In the weeks that followed, a female poet I’d always admired posted on social media: “Beware Poets—There are undercover ZIONISTS among us.” Later, at Columbia University, protesters formed a human chain to keep Zionists from entering the encampment.

Watching my identity as a Zionist weaponized against me and my fellow Jews by people with no skin in the game, I knew I had crossed a passageway I could never uncross. I knew it the way I know my own name. I knew it in my bones.

I now understood what would be required of me. I wasn’t only going to have to speak out in support of Jews and Israel. I would have to go to Israel and bear witness to the atrocities firsthand, sharpening my skills as an emotional stenographer, a storyteller, an archivist of grief.

I would also have to reclaim the word “Zionist” from those who had twisted it into an accusation. I would have to come out as a Zionist, even though I had never thought of myself as being in the closet. I would have to publicly and unapologetically tell the Jewish story—our diversity, our history, our connection to the land of Israel, and our right to exist as a people.

The cost was high: being heckled on stage, attacked online, losing lifelong friends, and becoming an outsider in a community I had called home for decades. But for the first time in my life, I felt a profound call to generational sacrifice—for my daughter, my nieces, and my nephew. I knew, as so many Jews before me had known, that there are moments in Jewish history that demand you show up. This was one of those moments.

And so I went to Israel. I stood on the scorched grounds of Kfar Aza and made a promise to a grieving mother. I walked through the ruins of the Nova music festival and made a promise to a young survivor. I sat beside the graves of eighteen-year-old soldiers at Mount Herzl, where the dirt was still fresh, and made a promise to the friends they had left behind.

The promise was always the same: I would never stop telling the world what had happened. For three chaotic years, people have told me to turn off the news and “go live my life.”

What they don’t understand is that I have never felt more alive.

I will keep watching the news others can’t bear to watch. I will keep following my assignment.

Because when Jews say “Never Again,” we really mean it.

Because I sleep at night knowing I chose conviction over comfort.

Because what I’ve lost in friends, I’ve gained in backbone.

So here I am.

Hineni.

There are moments in life that divide everything into a before and an after. For me, that moment came on June 11, 2003, when I boarded bus No. 14 in Jerusalem. Minutes later, a suicide bomber detonated himself just a few feet away from me. Seventeen people were murdered on that day, including all those seated and standing around me. More than a hundred of us were injured. I survived, but the person who was pulled off that burning bus was not the same person who boarded it that day. 

Most people think of the Hebrew word Hineni—“Here I am”—as something said from a place of certainty. A conscious decision to step forward when called to do something. Although I have always been someone to step up when things needed to get done, stepping up in the wake of profound pain may not be most people’s first instinct.

My Hineni moment began in the middle of incredible trauma. While I do not remember everything about those first few hours, I can recall that becoming an activist was the last thing on my mind. I remember being scared, feeling all alone, and lying in a hospital bed trying to understand what had happened. Yet, by nine a.m. of the very next day, after coming out of surgery in the early morning hours, I was already sitting in front of a room full of reporters from around the world. 

Looking back, it seems almost impossible that someone in my condition would agree to speak to the media. But I did. Still trying to process what had happened, I wasn’t thinking about advocacy or public speaking. I wasn’t trying to become a voice for anyone. At that point, I didn’t even know what had happened to others on the bus. It was the Second Intifada and, looking back, I think that I felt a responsibility to share what had happened to me so others around the world could better understand what was going on in Israel. 

At the time, terrorist attacks had become a routine part of the daily news cycle. For people around the world, it was just another headline. For those of us in Israel, it was reality. I didn’t want people to see this as just another attack. I wanted them to understand that innocent people—people with families, dreams, and everyday lives—were the ones paying the price. I had no idea that saying yes to that interview would shape the course of my life. I thought I was answering a reporter’s questions. I had no way of knowing it then, but that one interview would become the beginning of everything that followed.

More than two decades later, I now realize that was my first Hineni moment. Not because I felt ready, but because remaining silent was not an option. Over the years, I have continued to answer that same call. When I share my story, I share the story of those seventeen innocent people who did not get to go home to their families that day. As long as I keep speaking up, my voice will remain their voice, and they will never be forgotten. Given the opportunity to survive, I also received a responsibility to make sure their stories continued to be told.

As happens too often in terror attacks, the world moves on while survivors and families are left to rebuild their shattered lives. Because the victims should never be forgotten once the headlines faded, and because those who enable such attacks must always be held accountable, I now dedicate my life to advocating for victims’ rights, working with governments and policymakers, and becoming a plaintiff on lawsuits against those who finance terror.

Amidst this work, I have found the most meaning in founding my non-profit organization, Strength to Strength, established to support victims of terrorism around the world. Over the years, what started as a way to connect with other people who truly understood what I had been through has grown into a supportive global community for bereaved family members, survivors, and first responders. Seeing others realize they are no longer alone, watching lifelong friendships develop, and knowing that people have rediscovered a sense hope because of Strength to Strength has been the greatest gift to come out of such a horrific experience. What began as tragedy has become a purpose that continues to remind me and all those involved that healing is possible. 

Though many people assume that saying Hineni happens only once in one’s life, for me it has been a continuous choice that I have made over and over again. Every speech. Every interview. Every meeting with a victim who needs someone to listen. Every conversation with policymakers. Every time I have chosen to revisit the worst day of my life so that someone else might be heard, understood, or feel less alone. Each is its own Hineni moment. 

The choice to speak up has not come without a cost. Every time I tell my story, a part of me relives that day. Because trauma doesn’t disappear simply due to the passage of time, there are moments when speaking publicly reopens old wounds. Though the memories never go away, over time I have learned that healing isn’t about forgetting but about finding ways to carry the memory of what happened while moving forward. And while there have certainly been times when I’ve wondered if maybe it was time to step away, whenever I think about the incredible people I have met along this journey—the survivors, bereaved families, first responders, and advocates who have inspired me deeply—I am reminded of why I must keep answering that call.

Throughout my life, it has been an honor and privilege to stand beside those who intimately understand this journey in a way few others can. The opportunity to take one of the darkest moments of my life and turn it into something that brings other people hope is something I will never take for granted.

I never wanted to become a victim of terrorism. I never imagined this would be my mission and life’s work. But every time I choose to stand beside another victim and remind the world that the impact of terrorism lasts long after the headlines fade, I find myself answering the same call.

Here I am.

Hineni.

I woke up at 6: A.M. to a vibrating phone. It was Saturday morning in Massachusetts. In Israel, it was already afternoon. The screen was filled with missed calls, text messages, and notifications from family and friends. Are you awake? Call me. Turn on the news. My stomach dropped before I even knew why.

At first, I assumed there had been another rocket attack or suicide bombing. Growing up in Israel during the Second Intifada, I was familiar with this routine. But as I refreshed my phone, the messages kept coming. Friends were asking if my family was safe. Videos began to appear online. Then more videos. Then reports. And then the horror. A video. A headline. A name. Another video. Another headline. Another name. Within moments, there was nowhere left to hide.

Throughout my life, I thought that I truly understood trauma. I am a third-generation Holocaust survivor, grew up in Israel, and married a man who lost his father on September 11, 2001. When our kids were born, we almost lost them both to medical complications. Yet, even as I dedicated my professional life to studying the psychological impact of terrorism, I did not truly understand. 

I was glued to my seat, refreshing the news over and over. My coffee sat untouched until it turned cold. I couldn’t swallow. At some point I even collapsed on the floor, crying and yelling at my husband: “They even took the kids!” 

I remembered watching my own children being intubated as part of the procedure that would ultimately save their lives. Seeing them endure a kind of pain they’d never experienced before, I was struck by an excoriating agony that reached the core of my soul as one terrifying thought ran through my mind: What if I lose them? Overwhelmed by the helplessness and hopelessness that almost stole my ability to speak, I wrote a guide for other parents facing similar situations, explaining what to expect and sharing coping skills for surviving the uncertainty. Helping others gave me something trauma tries to take away: a sense of agency. That simple act of doing for others helped me survive some of the hardest moments of my life. October 7, 2023, was no different. 

Within hours of learning of the Hamas-led massacre, I posted my phone number to an Israeli Facebook group and offered my support as a trauma psychologist. Since trauma often leaves us feeling powerless, helping others was my way of reclaiming agency. Instantly, the calls started coming in. People were crying, panicking, looking for loved ones, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. For hours, I held space for other people’s fear, helping them find calm while the ground was still shifting beneath my own feet.

Soon, other therapists followed suit. Then even more did. Before long, what began as a single social media post had grown into a network of support that changed my life. Looking back, I realize that was the first time I answered the call to transform my expertise into service. Not consciously, not courageously. Just instinctively. 

But then came October 8, 2023. While October 7 changed my understanding of trauma, October 8 changed my understanding of people.

Like many Jews, I expected to receive compassion from non-Jewish friends and colleagues. I didn’t expect people to agree on politics. I didn’t expect a consensus. I simply expected a recognition of human suffering. I expected my phone to fill with messages from my non-Jewish friends asking if my family was alive. Instead, before most bodies were even identified and buried, before families even knew whether their loved ones were dead or alive, the world was already starting to justify the massacre. 

Trauma is painful, but when people deny your pain, your history, your grief, or your reality, they communicate something profoundly damaging: your suffering does not count. This is the salt poured onto the wound, and it has a name: Traumatic invalidation. I found myself wondering whether it was I or the world that had gone mad. The facts were clear, the videos were everywhere and the horror and grief were plainly real. Yet so many voices insisted on a different version of reality. The betrayal, in turn, hurt almost as much as the trauma itself. Friends disappeared. Professional colleagues went silent. Communities I thought I belonged to suddenly felt uncertain. I felt unsafe, unseen, and targeted. I felt alone. All alone. Experiencing a particular kind of helplessness as an Israeli living in the U.S.—knowing my country was bleeding, my family was there, and my friends were there while I was thousands of miles away—I wrote to a friend, I have a big hole in my heart. It is the size of a country. 

For months, I oscillated between helplessness and action. Sadness told me there had been a loss, while fear told me there was danger and anger demanded a response. I was feeling guilty as my children were laughing in the next room while other parents were desperately searching for theirs. Trying to stay afloat in my everyday life, I took care of my kids, answered emails, attended meetings, cared for my patients, and supervised my trainees. Hugging my children tighter than ever before, I breathed in their scent wondering why my chest hurt as I watched them walking off to school. When I didn’t know what else to do, I leaned harder into helping others and myself—meeting strangers, listening to their stories of invalidation and pain, finding a new community of people who gave me strength. 

Gradually, I realized that the work I had been doing for years was no longer enough. The moment called for something different, and I could either wait for someone else to answer the call, or I could answer it myself. There was no single moment when I decided to change the course of my career. No speech. No revelation. Just the quiet realization that I could no longer remain on the sidelines. Expanding my therapy room beyond its four walls, I turned therapy into testimony, research into advocacy, and teaching into bearing witness. Somewhere between grief and responsibility, the career I had spent years building became my calling.

I organized mental health support. I trained clinicians and educators. I spoke at hospitals, schools, universities, and state commissions. I published research papers, advocated for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas, and stood beside survivors. I wasn’t simply studying trauma or teaching post-traumatic growth anymore. I was living them.

As I began writing and speaking publicly about traumatic invalidation, messages started pouring in from around the world, each a reminder that naming an invisible wound is, in itself, an act of healing. People thanked me for giving language to experiences they had struggled to explain. In trying to make sense of my own pain, I gave thousands of others permission to acknowledge and put words to theirs. What started as a response to my own grief grew into advocacy, public speaking, research, and policy work. The awards and recognition that followed have been meaningful, but the greatest gift has been discovering the vulnerability and courage that led to connection, calling, and hope. The pain never disappeared, but neither did the purpose it revealed. 

I often teach that resilience is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to continue living despite suffering. There is, however, another possibility: Post-traumatic growth. The idea that trauma, while never desirable, can become a catalyst for transformation. Not simply bouncing back, but leaping forward and growing into someone you might never have become otherwise. 

Today, I have a new and more complex understanding of my identity and my community. I see courage through new eyes. I can comprehend what it means to stand up when doing so comes at a cost. Most important, I understand that hope is not a feeling. Hope is a choice. I now realize that, as a Jew, I know something about surviving darkness. I know something about carrying grief while continuing to build. I know something about refusing to surrender my humanity. 

The morning of October 7, 2023, was the moment the world changed. But my own Hineni moment came later, when I recognized that despair was asking me to become smaller, quieter, and more afraid. Instead, I chose to become louder, reclaim my space, and act with more courage than ever before. Not because I felt brave. Not because I had certainty. But because responsibility had become unavoidable. I have learned that courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision not to let fear have the final word. I often think about my grandparents; they survived a world that tried to erase them. My children deserve a world that refuses to erase them again. 

Somewhere between those two generations, I found my answer. 

I aim to embody the wisdom of Pirkei Avot: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” I cannot heal every wound or change every heart. But I can answer the part of the work that is mine. Every lecture, every article, every difficult conversation is my way of having that final word. Every patient I sit with, every child I help protect, every act of bearing witness is another way of answering the same call. 

Here I am.

Hineni.

Eleven days after the October 7 massacre, as darkness settled over Columbia’s campus, I stood in the middle of a small gathering and realized that silence was no longer an option.

There were around thirty of us—Jewish and Israeli students, faculty members, and friends—holding candles and posters bearing the faces of the hostages taken by Hamas. Though most of us did not know each other, we were all, in one way or another, experiencing the same thing. Having spent the previous eleven days watching images we could not forget, reading names we did not yet know by heart, and trying to understand how so much life could be destroyed in a single day, we had come together because we needed an outlet for the fear, rage, and helplessness that had been building inside us. We had come because, in that moment, we had no one to turn to but one another. We had arrived as strangers. Grief made us a community.

We had not gathered there by accident. A week earlier, just five days after the massacre, I had stood in that same spot watching two opposing events. On one lawn, Jewish students stood silently for twenty minutes—one second for each victim of the massacre—crying, hugging, and trying to absorb what had happened. On the other lawn, hundreds of students, faculty, and staff beat drums, praised “the resistance,” rallied against coexistence, and called for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. They weren’t making an argument about borders or governments. Nor were they demanding a peaceful resolution to the century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even before a single Israeli soldier had stepped foot in the Gaza Strip, a riled-up mob on campus was already celebrating the slaughter of civilians.

Watching in disbelief, I was unable to reconcile what I was seeing with everything I thought I knew about the people and institution around me. I had barely begun grieving the dead, grasping the sheer scale of the massacre, or worrying about my own family in Israel. Yet suddenly it felt as though another front in the war had opened—not by Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis, but by my very own academic community on Columbia’s campus. I stood there, jaw clenched, speechless.  I could not fathom how so many seemingly educated people could watch the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians and respond not with horror, but with glee. This was not political activism. This was not ideological disagreement. It was hatred. Pure and unadulterated hatred. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

The following week,  our vigil— for which we had secured all the required permissions—was supposed to take place on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library. But anti-Israel protestors had beaten us to the spot and occupied the space. In response, the university did what would become second nature over the coming year whenever protestors engaged in unsanctioned disruptions: Instead of telling them to move, the university told us to do so.

There was something deeply humiliating about being displaced from our own vigil. There was something profoundly painful about being unable to grieve in peace on our own campus. While we could have refused to leave, insisting that the university enforce its own rules and treat us with the same respect it afforded every other minority on campus, we stepped aside. We didn’t want a confrontation. We didn’t want to argue about politics. We weren’t looking for a fight. All we wanted was to mourn and be left alone. We had all come wounded, looking for somewhere safe enough to admit it. Grief-stricken, we found another corner of campus and formed a circle.

One by one, people cautiously stepped forward and began to speak. An Israeli woman whose husband taught at the university recounted the story of a young survivor of the Nova music festival who had watched her best friend dragged into a vehicle and taken to Gaza. A student holding an Israeli flag in one hand and raising two broken fingers with the other described how he had been attacked on campus while putting up posters of the hostages. A third speaker described the feeling that, once again, Jews had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Each story was different. Together, they described the same unbearable reality.

Some shared their frantic concern for relatives in Israel. Others spoke about the fear of being visibly Jewish on campus. Still others recounted interactions with classmates who’d celebrated the attack, professors who said nothing about it, and friends who suddenly seemed to treat Jewish grief as politically suspect. To the people in our circle, Israel was not an abstraction. It was the place where their parents lived, where their cousins had been called into reserve duty, and where people they loved were hiding in bomb shelters. Standing on one of the world’s most beautiful campuses, the distance between our lives and theirs felt almost unbearable.

As the final speaker stepped back, the circle fell silent. No one moved. It felt like the pause after lightning strikes, a collective holding of breath as we waited to find out how loud the thunder would be. Something was missing—we had named the pain and the astonishment, but not yet the source of the problem. I realized it was my turn.

At that point, I was still a business school professor who believed that my role was simply to teach, conduct research, and care for my students. I had never imagined becoming a public advocate. I had no prepared remarks. I was simply a Jew who had spent eleven days watching the world respond to the slaughter of Jews with denials, distortions, deflections, and delight. I was also a father—a Jewish-Israeli father—who saw his own children’s faces in the images of the murdered and the kidnapped.

Everywhere I looked, I recognized the same moral failure. The very communities and institutions that had taught me to show up for others had failed to show up for my own people in their time of need. The university that prided itself on belonging and inclusivity had allowed Jewish students to be pushed out of the conversation during their time of mourning. Faculty members who had built their careers around social justice had found reasons to excuse, minimize, or ignore the murder of Jewish civilians. Students who proudly proclaimed that they believed all women suddenly decided that Jewish women didn’t count. Colleagues who had taught me that silence was violence suddenly had nothing to say. Hostage posters were being torn down. Terrorist violence was being praised as resistance. Jewish fear was being treated as an inconvenience. Everything the university claimed to believe remained true—until the victims were Jews. Jewish lives had become the moral exception.

This moral failure was never about choosing Israel over Palestine. Nor was it about valuing one people’s lives over another’s. It was about recognizing that no political cause, regardless of how righteous it claimed to be, could justify burning families alive, raping women, or kidnapping children. It was about asking whether universities could still recognize that some acts lay beyond moral justification. It was about what we, as a society, stood for. Columbia’s leadership had pontificated endlessly about context, power, and history, yet fell strangely silent when Jewish lives were on the line. While we were still counting the dead and searching for the missing, people at one of America’s most prestigious universities were already glorifying those responsible. Someone had to say something. 

Someone had to say that this was wrong. Someone had to explain that Jewish students should not have to prove their humanity before being allowed to grieve. Someone had to force the university to see what was happening before it was too late. Columbia had broken the unspoken covenant every university makes with the parents who entrust it with their children: to educate them, challenge them, and keep them safe. Someone had to say that out loud. That someone would have to be me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I thought about the people who had been murdered and would never breathe again. I thought about the children taken from their homes, their small faces a painful reminder of my own children. I thought about how easily my family could have been visiting Israel that weekend, with only geography and chance separating our fate from the victims. I thought about my Jewish students, who came to learn and were now deluged with hate. I thought about my non-Jewish students, exposed to so much brainwashing and normalization of horror, in desperate need of guidance. I thought about how, one day, I would have to explain this moment to my children. Exhaling all the air from my lungs, I stepped into the center of the circle.

I did not know what I was about to say. I didn’t know that the words I was about to speak would change the course of my life and career. I didn’t know how many people would later tell me they had felt the same fear but had been unable to put it into words. All I knew was that the leaders of our most prestigious universities had failed their Jewish students. All I knew was that silence had become impossible. If no one else was going to say it, I would.

So I did. And I have not stopped since.

Here I am.

Hineni.

The summer is an ironically somber time for Jews. While the weather reaches its height of annual jollity, the Jewish calendar reaches its nadir.

The fast of Tish’ah b’Av commemorates what ArtScroll’s introduction to the Book of Lamentations, read in the synagogue that evening, calls “the quintessential day of Jewish tragedy.” It continues:

It was the day when the Jews in the Wilderness believed the libel of the Spies, and that generation lost its chance to enter the Land of Israel. Among other national calamities, both Temples were destroyed on Tishah B’Av. Nor the was the catalogue of woe limited to ancient times. During the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Tishah B’Av 1492 was the deadline for the Jews to leave the country or face death. And in 1914, Tishah B’Av was the day when World War I was declared, thus ushering in the political and economic collapse that resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Holocaust.

But, not many weeks after Tish’ah b’Av, there comes another summer day of mourning: a Gregorian date which has held significance for far less time.

A quarter-century has passed (somehow) since the massacre of 9/11. I was not yet eight-years-old and retain no memory of the day itself, but I do remember the aftermath: the late Bill Moyers speaking of the “smoking wound” in America’s heart; at least one animated PBS children’s show highlighting real children handing out pastries to surviving firefighters; and, of course, the trickle of trailers for searing, searching documentaries—the crowning masterpiece of which was Helen Whitney’s Faith & Doubt at Ground Zero. Every year, I make a ritual of watching Whitney’s film and a small collection of others as my own sort of Yiz’kor service of remembrance for an event of which I personally remember only fragments.

While the Jewish people as a whole have never been in danger of forgetting our exhaustive string of 9/11s, a large section of the events of the last 25 years have demonstrated that many Americans have indeed forgotten theirs.

Some of this amnesia, of course, has roots in one positive aspect of the American character. Unlike others, modern Americans have little talent for holding onto exterior grudges. Any hatred Italians bear for Austrians, or Poles for Russians, Englishmen for Frenchman, Croatians for Serbs is a passé, faraway concept in the American psyche. With human history checkerboarded with constant national and tribal feuding, the American preference for “moving on” and worrying about the newest iPhone can sometimes be more refreshing than troubling. For Americans, unlike other peoples, have usually been good at forgiving—even if that grace is “cheap,” as Bonhoeffer famously called it.

But amnesic forgiveness has cost America dear. Only six days after 9/11, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—actually a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization in its own right—brought President Bush to a mosque and instructed him that “Islam is peace.” The murderers who had just carried out the mass slaughter of 2,977 people suddenly were almost “forgiven”—and they suddenly had committed this act of ineffable evil for reasons different from their stated ones. Instead of letting the American people learn about the ideology which had flown men into buildings instead of to the Moon, the naïve, well-meaning Bush administration was successfully convinced that such a conversation was “hateful” and not worth having.

Words like “radicalism,” “fundamentalism,” and “extremism” substituted the proper name of the hijackers’ creed, blocking people from truly understanding the gravity of the ongoing threat the country faced. Then the failure to effectively justify the war in Afghanistan, let alone the project to “democratize” it, as a response to 9/11 made many lose interest. The Iraq War, despite the irrevocably abhorrent character of Saddam Hussein, also did very little, even before its popularity began to dissolve, to sanctify 9/11 as a pivotal part of America’s history. By the Obama years, “Islamophobia”—a term imported from the British Muslim mobs who had supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989—achieved an importance it did not have before, and a decidedly “self-critical” attitude to the America 9/11 so wounded had gained in fashion.

American society never thought deeply about how to preserve the memory of 9/11 while it was still fresh, and then, distracted by controversial wars, economic recession, and the massive political chaos which followed in Obama’s wake, the country made good use of its ability to forget and seemed to be content with slowly “moving on.” With both Millennials and “Gen Z” generally having developed awash in the propaganda either of anti-American teachers’ unions or the wastes of “Podcastistan,” to them, 9/11 is often just a few images from the magnetic tape age, only of interest as a vessel of conspiratorial nonsense. Not surprisingly, by 2025, a Harvard Political Review poll found that only 41% of young Americans were proud of their country, and 29% agreed that they were “embarrassed to be American.”

Concerns about immigration from the Muslim world, too—in which support for strict adherence to Sharia hovered at a mean of 56.8% in a 2013 Pew study, and, according to a 2014 ADL poll, 74% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa expressed deep hatred of Jews—never seem to have registered as sufficiently important. Islam is not a race and it was never racist to worry about how compatible certain beliefs were with a tolerant and diverse country’s system of constitutional rights. Now, in 2026, violence on the part of Muslim immigrants against Jewish and non-Jewish Americans alike has only become far more common than it was in 2001. Anti-American Muslim politicians have been elected to serve inside the very Capitol Building Flight 93 probably was meant to destroy, and CAIR, known to be a money-laundering front for Hamas, is organizing more than 200 similar candidates to run for state and local seats nationwide.

Today, our leaders and our culture’s irresponsibility has let national memory evaporate to such an extent that Zohran Mamdani—a Jew-hating, Muslim communist who appointed a lawyer who defended an al-Qaeda terrorist out of direct sympathy as his chief counsel—is mayor of New York City. Seduced by absurd promises of free buses and groceries, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers voted for a man who blamed FBI surveillance for al-Qaeda imam Anwar al-Awlaki’s decision to join the organization and took $100,000 in campaign donations from CAIR.

Even worse, some 33% of Jewish New Yorkers proved they, too, had forgotten 9/11. They voted for a man who said he wants to “globalize” Hamas’s anti-Jewish genocide and made arresting Prime Minister Netanyahu (an utterly illegal fantasy) a major campaign promise.

Jewish New Yorkers might like to know that the plot which eventually became 9/11 originated as a plot to massacre Jews. As 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin admitted to CBS News in 2002, chief bomber Ramzi Yousef “told me, ‘I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.’” Since bombing Crown Heights and Williamsburg proved too difficult, and “the majority of people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews,” Yousef told Yasin, the target was moved to Lower Manhattan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was Yousef’s uncle, and vowed to complete the atrocity his nephew had left unfinished. In the end, despite Hezbollah’s lie that no Jews went to work that day, a maximum of around 400 Jews are estimated to have been murdered in all three strikes and all four planes.

At this perilous point, is there any conceivable salve for such suicidal absentmindedness?

The only possible answer would be for Americans to borrow a leaf from Jewish tradition. Though the First Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the Second in 70 C.E., most Jews have never forgotten. Why? Because Jews understood these catastrophes as spiritual as well as historical events; that they had meaning for future generations; and that they were blaringly relevant for their relationship with God.

Jews never forgot the destruction of the Temples because the rabbis established the fast of Tish’ah b’Av, an integral part of an exiled nation’s liturgy which grounded it in the significance of calamity as both a wicked enemy’s cruelty on the outside but also its own failure within.

Yet, as the ArtScroll introduction continues, “The Sages teach that the Messiah will be born on Tishah B’Av, meaning that a proper understanding of and reflection upon the causes of destruction reveal that contained within are the seeds of redemption.”

If America were to develop a reverence for 9/11 which mirrored Jews’ remembrance of the destructions of the Temples, America could begin turning towards its redemption. Understanding where the nation went wrong, but seeing the nation as a sacred thing which must be preserved to be restored. Recognizing 9/11 as a perennial spiritual trauma to be healed is what Whitney’s extraordinary film does, and why it has aged so little. That is how 2,977 innocent people’s lives can be given sanctity.

America cannot defeat its enemies and renew its vigor if it places no value upon sacred memory. That is what Judaism can teach. “We do not forget our tragedies,” ArtScroll concludes, for “we retain our optimism, because ‘Had I not fallen, I could not have arisen; had I not sat in the darkness, God would not have been a light to me’ (Midrash Tehilim Ch. 22).”

A version of this article was also published in JNS. Used with permission.

With Rosh ha-Shanah just a day away, and September 11 in its midst, I can’t help but think of that naïve, Park Slope Food Coop member that I was. If she could see me now, surely, I’d get a huge eye roll of disapproval.

It was my first job out of graduate school, working with predominately children and families up on Third Avenue, in East Harlem. When I could finally step outside on what was a noticeably bright, blue-skied morning, a plume of white smoke billowed in the distance instead. Shocking. 

The Twin Towers had fallen, and the unthinkable had happened to so many ordinary, some heroic, lives—their families, loved ones, friends, strangers. 

I was seeing clients who had significant trauma as the morning was unfolding. I remember saying something like, “See you next week,” walking into the waiting area to pick up my next client, only to arrive to a quiet commotion between staff: a plane had hit the Twin Towers, and it was bad. Tense as staff were leaning in, listening over the radio of the unfolding terror. 

Back into session with another young child, seen conjointly with his mom, grappling with their own issue of gravity. The terrorist attack was not their worry or even curiosity of the day. Their life was happening now too, in that small room, the lived pain that had brought them there.

Back to the waiting area.

The second tower had been hit. 

And then they came down. Or that was another session later, it’s a bit of a blur. Back and forth, quick hugs with close colleagues in between. White chalk-like smoke, debris and all of it… swallowed the streets below.

Quick call. Check-ins on the land line since cell phones were out. And onto see the next client. 

When I finally had a moment, calls to family and friends. Quick stories shared. Several friends of friends were missing. I later learned that one made her way down the countless steps in pitch black, obstructed by the most awful, the stairwell, running down through the unspeakable to reach physical safety. The tower came down soon after. She got out.

The bridges were closed; I couldn’t go home from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I found refuge at a family friend’s apartment. 

I wore the same outfit, a white button-down shirt, in a fog, for about a week. When I was back in the Manhattan apartment, I vacillated between the X-Files, phone calls, and almost nonstop news coverage and the man falling from the building too many times on TV. It was devastating. I was fixated on the coverage because how could this happen here in the U.S.? Such naïveté.

As a therapist, my purpose was to show up for my clients and to be present for them. Therapists met as a group for consultation and support a couple of times a day for check-ins. And mind you, terrorism was terrorism. There was no debate about what had happened. Fear. The juxtaposition of working with clients in their own preoccupying trauma and what was unfolding downtown was something I was trying to make sense of. It was an unintended early lesson in managing my own reality, countertransference, and ego in order to best show up for the person in front of me. And in managing my own assumptions about where someone should be emotionally. Mind you, it was mostly children and families. But it was also a reality check about how so many of my clients wanted help with crises or whatever it was they were facing in their everyday, not with what was happening downtown. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about those deemed “missing.” I made my way with a friend down to Union Square where posters of the missing were affixed throughout the park, people gathered.

There was a fight. Ugly, angry words exchanged. And finally, an embrace between two men. Many of us cried.  

I remember calling my cousin in Israel when it first happened, and when I was fearful and catastrophizing about driving home across the Brooklyn Bridge. 

“How do you live with the fear of terrorism, of missiles, of the unknown. That this could happen again?” “Eh, I live my life, what am I going to do. We can’t live in fear.” That shrug-your-shoulders Israeli intonation of survival.

It took me almost two weeks (a week after the bridges finally reopened) to move through my anxiety to cross back home to Brooklyn. Though I was seeing clients, I had been in a shutdown sleepwalk outside the walls of the counseling center.

I drove with my friend who worked with me and too lived in Park Slope. We held our breath, driving in silence until we made it to the other side. 

Then a sigh of relief. 

When I got home, I embraced my friends. 

One had taken photographs from the roof just as the second plane hit the second tower. She didn’t develop them until years later. Or maybe she did, but didn’t look at them until she was ready, when life and time and the raw aftermath had passed.

Too much. 

My downstairs neighbor held on to papers that blew over from the towers to this side of the river. He kept them on display in his home. It felt weird. 

I wanted him to return them. 

To someone. Someone’s handwriting—is he or she alive? Who was it? 

There was something else, an object, but I don’t remember what, that he kept as another keepsake. Though well intentioned, I imagine, I recall feeling that there was something perverse about displaying these fragments of people’s lives, people who may have been killed, might have tried to escape, or made it out safe somewhere. A piece of someone’s life had landed across the river. I wanted to know who took that pen to paper. Were they safe?  

The view from our roof was like looking at a faraway futuristic world of Armageddon. That silver crooked mass jutting from the ground, white smoke rising above it, moving in this direction or whichever with the wind. 

I had friends who were social workers at NYU Medical Center that day and for days afterward. When news of the attack happened, they mobilized the ER and stood outside waiting to treat massive amounts of people, to comfort the families and process what had happened. 

They waited. The people never came. It was heartbreaking and surreal.

We know who did it. We know it was terrorism, orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. 

So hearing the twisted revisionism, the attempts now to water down what it was—terrorism—leaves me sad and disgusted. My younger self wouldn’t believe it. There are still moments of shock at such a horrific erasure of reality. Back then, it was fringe and seemingly unwell conspiracy theorists who engaged in historical revisionism and hate. The cult-like groupthink now feels more worrying.

On October 8, a soccer mom relayed that her son came home upset about “What the terrorists did in Israel.” The mom swiftly told me, “And I told him, we don’t call them terrorists. That’s dehumanizing.” And that was just the beginning of what has unfolded before my eyes. Inversions, projections, revisionism, hate.

Of not being shut down into silence. I think about the young people in classrooms who deserve better than revisionism and fixed binary explanations of the world. Of the normalization of projections of who is deemed “oppressor vs. oppressed,” all dressed up as education or social justice. Of colleagues being put on “Zionist lists,” because they have Jewish-sounding names, and of clients being handed litmus tests for what they are allegedly permitted to believe or say for entry. Clients seeking help and presence. This ideological capture continues to violate our profession’s core ethics and our most basic call to do no harm.

“Eh. I live my life. What am I going to do? I will not live in fear,” and I will not mince words about what I see. I think of my cousin’s refrain often now, especially after October 7, when the world has seemed both upside down and crystal clear.

I think of Rosh ha-Shanah and this new year. This sweetness of beginning again, even when the world feels like everything except sweet. Maybe it’s the sweetness of attunement to reality. Of staying connected to what is real, even when there are many who push to distort what we see, what we know, and what we remember.  

I think about how, on September 11, as a younger person in the beginning of my career, I learned about showing up while I couldn’t control what was happening downtown. I cannot tell another person, or my clients how they are supposed to feel. I can only be there, pay attention. I can manage my own fear and ego and do my best to make room for someone else in their world. That’s continued to be at the core of the work. And it’s our most basic ethical duty.

I can remember the nearly 3,000 people behind the pieces of paper that flew with the wind across the river, even if I never knew their names. And I can outright refuse to turn victims into distorted abstractions or perpetrators for that matter. I can call something what it is when the words matter.And then I can change clothes, clean up, and show up for this ride in life. Fully present. I will not live in fear nor mince words about what I see.

Hineni.

Donald Trump did not create the crisis that transformed the American right. He exposed it. He broke through institutions that had become insulated from the people they supposedly served, shattered political assumptions that had hardened into dogma, and gave millions of Americans a way to express grievances the political class had spent decades refusing to hear. He demonstrated that the old Republican coalition was no longer capable of speaking for much of its own electorate, and that the institutions claiming to protect democracy had become remarkably hostile to democratic accountability whenever voters threatened their power.

A political movement cannot govern indefinitely through disruption. A wrecking ball can clear a condemned structure, but it cannot become the foundation of the building that replaces it. Eventually, a movement must decide how it will govern when in power.

That is the task now before the American right.

The Republican establishment that existed before Trump cannot be restored. It defended free markets while tolerating corporate capture, praised limited government while allowing the administrative state to expand, and spoke reverently of the Constitution while accepting the steady transfer of legislative authority from Congress to executive agencies, courts, international organizations, and private institutions working in concert with government. It also celebrated globalization without adequately considering national resilience, social cohesion, industrial capacity, or the interests of the citizens whose country it governed.

Permanent populism is not an adequate replacement. Populism is a warning system. It is exceptionally good at identifying betrayal. It is less reliable as a philosophy of government because popular anger, like elite arrogance, can become unconstrained.

A reborn conservative movement must therefore be constitutionalist without becoming antiquarian. It must be populist enough to hear ordinary citizens but principled enough to resist mob politics. It must be pro-market without defending corporate capture, national without becoming tribal, morally serious without attempting to enforce every virtue through government, and technologically capable without surrendering human freedom to technological systems. It must be institutionally constructive without defending institutions that have abandoned their purposes.

Most importantly, it must understand that society and government are not the same thing.

This distinction has been lost across the political spectrum. The progressive left increasingly treats every social problem as evidence that government lacks sufficient authority, funding, or administrative reach. Parts of the populist right have begun responding with an inverted version of the same impulse, arguing that government should use centralized power to impose conservative outcomes. Both approaches confuse political control with social health.

Government has an important but limited role in shaping the conditions under which a healthy society can flourish. It can punish crime, protect marriage as an institution, defend religious liberty, prevent public censorship, preserve educational freedom, and maintain competitive markets. What it cannot do is supply the virtues those institutions depend upon. Fidelity, faith, honesty, parental responsibility, wisdom, diligence, and honorable conduct have to come from individuals, families, communities, and culture. 

A conservative platform must therefore begin outside government. The first responsibility belongs to individuals, families, religious institutions, communities, educators, businesses, and civic institutions. Only after establishing what society must do for itself can we properly define what government should do.

That sequence is not rhetorical. It is the architecture of liberty.

I. Non-Government Conservative Solutions to Societal Problems

1. Restore Human Agency + Responsibility

A free society must begin with the assumption that human beings possess agency. People are influenced by their circumstances, formed by their cultures, helped or hindered by institutions, and subjected to forces they do not control. They are not, however, products of those forces.

The denial of agency is one of the most destructive ideas in modern political life. It appears compassionate because it relieves people of blame, but it also strips them of power. A person who is told that his failures are entirely the product of systems, identities, traumas, economic classes, or historical forces is also being told that he has little ability to change his condition. He may be offered sympathy, political recognition, or material assistance, but he is denied authorship over his own life.

Conservatives must reject both cruelty and fatalism. It is cruel to pretend that everyone begins from the same position or faces the same burdens. It is fatalistic to treat disadvantage as destiny. The proper response to unequal circumstances is not to deny human agency but to strengthen it.

That begins with the language we use. A conservative movement should speak to people as capable adults rather than permanent victims. It should recognize injustice without constructing identities around grievance, and it should offer help without making helplessness a prerequisite for receiving it. It should tell people that the obstacles before them may be real, unfair, and difficult, but that their choices still matter.

This principle must be practiced before it can be legislated. Individuals must accept responsibility for their conduct, their habits, their families, and their communities. 

Freedom means the right to make choices, but it also means bearing the consequences of those choices. A culture that celebrates autonomy while rejecting responsibility eventually demands that someone else absorb the cost of every mistake. 

Personal responsibility does not require radical individualism. Human beings depend on one another, and a healthy society creates networks of obligation, support, instruction, and forgiveness. The point is not that every person must succeed alone. The point is that assistance should restore a person’s capacity to act rather than replace it.

Conservative institutions should judge their work by whether or not they increase agency. 

The same standard should apply across civil society. Mentoring should leave people more capable of directing their own lives, addiction ministries should pursue recovery rather than permanent management, and charities should judge success by restored independence rather than continued enrollment. Schools should prepare students to reason, work, and participate in self-government, while religious institutions should form people who understand that grace and obligation belong together. 

The restoration of agency is the foundation beneath every other non-government solution. Families cannot thrive without responsible adults, and markets cannot function without trustworthy participants. Constitutional government cannot survive without citizens capable of self-restraint, and a nation of people who no longer believe they are responsible for themselves will inevitably be governed by tyrants.

2. Recover the Moral Architecture of Liberty

Liberty cannot survive on procedure. A constitution can divide power, courts can enforce rights, and elections can transfer authority peacefully, but none of those institutions can substitute indefinitely for a people capable of governing themselves.

A free society requires more than political rules. It requires a moral architecture.

That architecture begins with the belief that human beings possess inherent dignity independent of government, that right and wrong exist outside of political power, that individuals possess moral agency, and that freedom carries responsibility. It assumes that human beings are imperfect, which is why power must be restrained, but also redeemable, which is why people cannot be permanently reduced to their worst act, their ancestry, their economic class, or the sins of a group to which they belong.

These principles do not require every American to share the same theology. They do require enough agreement about human value, truth, responsibility, honesty, justice, mercy, and the limits of coercion to make a free society possible.

The Judeo-Christian tradition supplied much of that framework to the West. Greek reason and natural law helped refine it, and the Enlightenment translated much of it into political principles. The resulting civilization placed the individual above the state while placing moral law above both.

If the state stands above morality, whatever the state commands eventually becomes moral. If the individual stands above morality, liberty becomes license and society breaks down. In either case, self-government becomes impossible. 

The conservative answer is not to give government the power to enforce a national theology. That would contradict the principles we are trying to preserve. Moral formation therefore belongs primarily to families, religious institutions, communities, schools, friendships, and conscience.

Those institutions must again teach that honesty matters even when lying is advantageous, that fidelity matters when infidelity is tempting, that duty does not disappear when it becomes inconvenient, and that freedom does not mean freedom from consequence. They must teach that justice applies to individuals rather than racial, religious, sexual, or economic classes, and that forgiveness remains possible because people are more than the worst thing they have ever done.

A society must have enough shared moral ground that strangers can trust one another, disagreements can remain peaceful, laws can be viewed as legitimate, contracts can be honored without constant supervision, and political opponents can remain fellow citizens.

When that moral consensus disappears, the state has to replace trust with procedure and conscience with enforcement. Rules multiply as informal restraint disappears. Bureaucracies grow when families and communities weaken, and surveillance becomes attractive once nobody trusts anyone else.

Eventually we get a society built on compliance rather than virtue.

I would much rather have a nation built on virtue.

The purpose of liberty has never been to free human beings from moral responsibility. It is to leave them free to exercise it.

3. Rebuild the Family as the Primary Social Institution

The individual is the basic moral unit of a free society, but the individual is not its basic social unit. That role belongs to the family.

The family is where human beings first encounter authority, obligation, sacrifice, forgiveness, trust, and love. It teaches children that they possess rights, but also that other people possess them too. Family teaches that actions have consequences, that promises matter, and that membership in a community creates duties that cannot be reduced to immediate self-interest.

No government program can reproduce the daily moral formation of a stable family. A caseworker cannot replace a father any more than a public benefit cannot replace a mother. A school cannot fully compensate for a home without stability, discipline, affection, or expectation. Government may intervene when families become abusive or dangerous, but even necessary intervention is an emergency substitute for something that has already broken.

Conservatives have often spoken of family values as though stating support for them were enough. It is not. A movement that claims the family is foundational must organize its social behavior around that belief.

Men must be taught that fatherhood is not an optional accessory to sexual freedom. Women must be supported in motherhood without being told that care, sacrifice, and family formation represent failures of ambition. Marriage must again be treated as a serious covenant rather than a temporary arrangement of convenience, and children should be understood as members of families who require formation, protection, and guidance.

This cannot be achieved through legislation. It requires religious institionss that prepare people for marriage before officiating weddings, and it requires older couples willing to mentor younger ones. It requires fathers who bring other fathers into networks of responsibility, and employers who understand that stable families create stable workers and communities. It requires relatives who remain present when families experience illness, financial hardship, disability, addiction, or loss.

A family-centered conservatism should also recover intergenerational responsibility. Parents owe duties to children, adult children owe duties to aging parents, and each generation inherits obligations from those that came before it. The alternative is a society in which every natural obligation is gradually transferred to an institution.

The stronger the family becomes, the less government must attempt to become a substitute. That does not mean every family will be healthy, intact, or self-sufficient. It means public policy should be designed around the recognition that government cannot improve society by making family formation more difficult, or parental authority less meaningful.

The rebirth of the family begins through example. Conservatives must live as though marriage matters, children matter, fidelity matters, and obligations endure even when they become inconvenient. Culture is transmitted most powerfully by what people repeatedly do.

4. Rebuild the Institutions Between the Individual + the State

A free society is not composed of isolated individuals standing before a national government. Between them lie religious institutions, charities, neighborhood groups, professional associations, unions, clubs, fraternal orders, schools, volunteer organizations, local businesses, extended families, and countless informal networks of cooperation.

These institutions allow people to solve common problems without transforming every disagreement into a national political conflict. They give individuals places to belong, responsibilities to fulfill, and opportunities to lead. They create trust by bringing people into repeated contact with one another. They also distribute authority, knowledge, and problem-solving capacity throughout society.

The decline of civil society creates a vacuum that government is eager to fill. When communities no longer care for their own members, distant institutions take over. A conservative renewal must therefore be an institutional renewal.

Religious institutions should recover their role as centers of service, instruction, mutual aid, and community formation. Charities should focus on relationships and outcomes rather than grant acquisition and program growth. Business organizations should mentor entrepreneurs and connect young people to trades. Retirees should be brought into schools, civic groups, and mentorship programs rather than treated as though their useful lives have ended, and veterans should be recognized as reservoirs of leadership and public service.

Civil society should address problems at the scale where relationships remain possible. Addiction recovery, homelessness, youth mentorship, reentry after incarceration, care for the elderly, support for young mothers, and assistance to families facing temporary hardship are all strengthened when the people providing help know those receiving it. Local knowledge reveals distinctions that centralized programs cannot see. It can distinguish a person experiencing a temporary crisis from one trapped in addiction, an individual seeking work from one avoiding it, and a family needing short-term assistance from one requiring sustained intervention.

Non-government institutions must also guard their independence. When charities, universities, professional associations, and religious organizations become financially dependent on government, they can gradually become extensions of government. A nominally private institution that depends on public money and implements public priorities is not fully part of civil society. It is part of the administrative system.

Conservatives should build institutions that can survive without ideological permission from government, major corporations, or centralized philanthropic networks. That requires donors willing to fund durable organizations rather than temporary campaigns.

Political victories are temporary. Institutions endure. The left understood this long ago. A conservative movement that wins elections but fails to rebuild civil society will repeatedly inherit a government surrounded by institutions committed to defeating it.

5. Reclaim Education as Formation Rather Than Credentialing

Education is not primarily the transfer of information. It is the formation of people capable of understanding reality, exercising judgment, participating in a civilization, and governing themselves.

A society that does not know its own history cannot preserve what it inherited. A citizen who cannot understand an argument cannot evaluate political claims, and a voter who cannot distinguish correlation from causation, price from value, or evidence from assertion is easily manipulated. An employee who possesses credentials without useful knowledge has been cheated, even when the credential was expensive.

Parents must reclaim responsibility for education whether their children attend public schools, private schools, religious schools, charter schools, or are educated at home. Sending a child to school does not transfer the moral responsibility for that child’s formation. Parents should know what their children are learning, what books they are reading, how they are being evaluated, and what assumptions are being presented as unquestionable truths.

Conservatives should expand homeschool networks, tutoring cooperatives, private scholarship funds, classical academies, vocational programs, and apprenticeships. Businesses should partner directly with schools and civic organizations to teach useful skills. Tradesmen should take apprentices, and retired professionals should teach.

Education must also recover civic formation. Students should understand the Constitution, federalism, the separation of powers, natural rights, the history of slavery and abolition, the development of religious liberty, and the long struggle to apply equality before the law consistently. They should learn that the American inheritance contains failures and contradictions, but also contains the principles through which those failures could be addressed. Ours was never formed as a perfect union and perfection is unattainable, which is why our Constitution promises only a “more perfect union.”

Children who study only the faults of society don’t make it “more perfect” as adults. They burn it down.

Civic education should not become conservative indoctrination though. Students should be taught how to examine claims, compare evidence, recognize incentives, and identify assumptions. A confident civilization does not require history to be sanitized. It requires history to be taught accurately, without political axes to grind.

Economic education is equally important. Students should understand that wealth must be created before it can be distributed, that prices communicate information, that inflation destroys purchasing power, that debt transfers obligations into the future, and that incentives influence behavior even when policymakers have benevolent intentions. These are not partisan doctrines. They are necessary tools for understanding the systems in which citizens live.

The same principle applies to higher education. Families should stop treating a university degree as the only respectable path into adulthood. Employers should reconsider degree requirements that have little relationship to job performance, and students should compare the expected value of a credential with its cost. 

Education will improve when families and communities stop behaving as captive consumers.

6. Restore Work, Production + Stewardship

An economy exists to create value. It allows people to cooperate, specialize, exchange, innovate, produce, and improve their material conditions. Profit is not the purpose of society, but in a functioning market it is a signal that an organization has created something other people value at a cost they are willing to bear.

The answer is to rebuild a culture of production and stewardship.

Businesses should measure success over years rather than reporting cycles, and executives should understand themselves as stewards of institutions that include workers, customers, investors, suppliers, and communities. That does not mean every firm must pursue a politically defined collection of social goals. It only means leadership should create durable value rather than doing things that make a short-term profit at the expense of long-term viability.

Companies should invest in workers, apprenticeships, process improvement, resilience, and productive capacity. They should shorten the distance between decision-makers and the consequences of their decisions. Leaders who never encounter customers, production floors, local managers, or failed processes eventually begin managing abstractions.

Workers also bear responsibilities. A productive economy requires reliability, discipline, adaptability, and a willingness to learn. Conservatives should resist political narratives that treat workers as interchangeable inputs or permanent victims, but they should also resist romanticizing workers in ways that deny individual responsibility. Employers can behave badly, institutions can become exploitative, and workers can fail too. A healthy market requires accountability in every direction.

Consumers possess more power than they often realize. Every purchase rewards a producer, a supply chain, and a set of practices. Consumers should ask whether businesses deliver value, tell the truth, and accept responsibility for failure. They should be willing to support local firms, emerging competitors, and companies that resist political coercion even when doing so requires modest sacrifice.

Entrepreneurship must again become a form of civic renewal. Small businesses build local knowledge, distribute economic authority, train workers, create community leaders, and provide alternatives to national institutions. Conservative business networks should help entrepreneurs.

A pro-market movement should not be a movement that automatically defends every corporation. It should defend the process through which people create value, compete honestly, and bear the consequences of their decisions.

7. Rebuild Institutions Committed to Truth

A civilization cannot function without institutions capable of discovering, testing, and communicating truth. Journalism, science, education, law, and technology all depend on public trust that cannot be demanded. Trust must be earned.

The collapse of trust in media and expert institutions did not occur because ordinary people suddenly became hostile to knowledge. It occurred because too many institutions confused authority with credibility. They concealed uncertainty, suppressed disagreement, selected facts according to political usefulness, while treating criticism as evidence of ignorance or malice.

Conservatives should not respond by creating a mirror image of the institutions they oppose. Propaganda does not become truth when it supports the correct political positions. A conservative news organization that misleads its audience damages the same information system as a progressive organization that does so, and an institution cannot restore trust while rewarding whatever confirms the preferences of its consumers.

Independent media should distinguish reporting from commentary, disclose conflicts, link to primary evidence, correct errors conspicuously, and acknowledge uncertainty. Readers and listeners should reward institutions that challenge them rather than reassure them, and conservative audiences must stop treating emotional satisfaction as proof of accuracy.

Scientists and physicians should rebuild professional cultures in which disagreement is expected rather than punished. Data should be available whenever privacy and legitimate security concerns permit. Methods should be transparent and findings should be reproducible. Experts should distinguish clearly between what evidence demonstrates, what they infer from it, and what policies they prefer.

Conservatives should also stop treating the institutions arrayed against open discourse as though they form a perfectly unified ideological bloc. They do not. Their interests frequently conflict. Environmental organizations, authoritarian governments, multinational corporations, religious states, supranational regulators, and activist NGOs cooperate where their incentives align, but they disagree profoundly. Those contradictions should be exposed. Institutions claiming universal moral authority should be forced to apply their principles to their own allies as a system dependent upon coordinated conformity becomes less durable once its participants are forced to choose between incompatible commitments. 

The solution to institutional failure is not the abolition of expertise. It is the restoration of humility, transparency, competition, and correction.

8. Build a New Intellectual Commons 

We should not assume that existing institutions will reform themselves. They won’t unless forced to do so by market forces.

Universities, professional organizations, journals, media institutions, and credentialing bodies once developed because society needed mechanisms for transmitting knowledge, testing ideas, and identifying expertise. The institutions were not the source of knowledge, though.

The next intellectual class will emerge primarily from outside many of the institutions that claim intellectual authority. Its members will be people whose ideas remain accountable to reality: physicians whose treatments have to work, engineers and manufacturers whose designs must function, scientists whose findings must be reproducible, and tradesmen whose competence can be seen in what they build. Scholars can be part of this class as well, but only if they are willing to subject their arguments to the same kind of scrutiny and correction.

Reality still punishes such people when they are wrong, and conservatives should build new institutions around them.

Peer review can move into the open, allowing methods, evidence, assumptions, and criticism to be examined directly rather than filtered through institutional prestige. Independent journals and standards bodies can compete on rigor, while fellowships and other forms of support can give serious thinkers room to work without forcing them through ideological gatekeepers. Cross-disciplinary forums can reconnect fields that have become too isolated from one another, and apprenticeships can tie intellectual development back to production, practice, and demonstrable competence. 

None of this requires abolishing universities. If universities return to their purpose, they can participate as well. Competition may even help restore them.

But some will fail, and they must be allowed to do so.

Credentials are useful signals only when the institutions issuing them remain competent. Once credentials primarily signal ideological or bureaucratic conformity, society must develop better credentials.

This principle applies to journalism, medicine, science, law, economics, and public policy. Expertise deserves respect only when it demonstrates expertise. It does not deserve deference simply because an organization has declared itself authoritative.

A distributed intellectual commons would make intellectual authority competitive again. Bad arguments could be challenged without permission. Failed predictions could be remembered. Successful methods could spread. New institutions could emerge around people who consistently demonstrate competence, while failed institutions would no longer be protected from competition by reputation alone.

Truth is not the property of institutions.

Liberty of mind precedes permission from gatekeepers, and a free people do not need permission to think.

9. Renew Citizenship + Assimilation

A nation is more than a government operating within a border. It is a people joined by history, institutions, obligations, habits, and a shared understanding of political membership.

American citizenship has never rested entirely on ancestry. It rests on allegiance to a constitutional order. That makes assimilation possible, but it does not make assimilation automatic. Newcomers should be welcomed into the nation as future Americans rather than maintained as permanent representatives of separate populations.

Assimilation also creates obligations for native-born Americans. A society cannot ask newcomers to join a culture its existing citizens refuse to understand, defend, or transmit. Millions of Americans born inside the country know little about it. They possess citizenship as a legal status but have not been formed in citizenship as a practice.

Religious institutions, schools, community groups, employers, veterans’ organizations, and local governments should create pathways into American life, and immigrants should encounter neighbors willing to explain customs and expectations. Communities should celebrate naturalization, encourage civic participation, and make it clear that national belonging is real.

A healthy national identity is neither globalist nor tribal. Globalism treats the nation as an administrative unit whose people may be rearranged according to economic convenience. Tribal nationalism treats citizenship as the political expression of ancestry. American conservatism must reject both.

The nation exists to protect a particular constitutional civilization and the people joined within it. Citizenship carries both benefits and obligations. It is not an ethnic inheritance, a consumer product, or a temporary permit to occupy territory.

10. Build a Movement That Produces Statesmen

Political systems respond to incentives just as economic systems do. When voters reward theatrical aggression, candidates will become theatrical. When donors reward access, politicians will sell it, and when media reward outrage, public figures will remain outraged. 

When parties measure success only through election results, they will pursue whatever produces votes in the next cycle, even when it damages the country over the next generation.

A conservative renewal requires a different standard of political leadership.

Conservative voters should judge candidates by more than ideology. They should ask whether a candidate understands the office being sought, whether he can explain the purpose of the institutions he proposes to reform, whether he has managed anything successfully, whether he can distinguish allies from followers, and whether he accepts limits on his own authority.

Parties should recruit leaders from local government, the military, business, education, religious institutions, and civic organizations. Candidates should be developed before they become national personalities, and governing competence should be considered a conservative virtue.

Let the incompetent run on the political left.

Donors and media organizations should stop rewarding candidates whose only ability is attracting attention.Attention can be useful, particularly when entrenched institutions must be challenged, but it is not a substitute for judgment. A movement composed entirely of provocateurs will eventually provoke itself into irrelevance.

This also requires clear boundaries. A reborn conservative movement must reject cults of personality, permanent emergency politics, right-wing centralization, ancestry-based nationalism, the suppression of lawful speech, corporatism, politicized law enforcement, state-enforced virtue, and mob rule. These are nothing more than progressive methods attached to different priorities.

A conservative movement must also refuse to govern through permanent fear.

Frightened people accept powers they would reject under normal circumstances. They tolerate censorship, emergency authority, selective enforcement, executive shortcuts, and violations of ordinary restraints because they have been convinced that normal rules cannot survive the emergency. Once politics enters that state, every election becomes the most important election in history and every opponent becomes an existential threat.

The left has repeatedly fallen into this trap. The right cannot answer it by building an inverted version of the same thing.

Conservatives cannot oppose the abuse of power only when that power is directed against them. Censorship, lawfare, weaponized agencies, and political violence do not become legitimate when their targets change. A movement that condemns those methods while out of power and adopts them once in power has not restored constitutional government. It has only changed who controls the machine. 

A conservative government must dismantle politicized power rather than inheriting it.

That requires calm leadership even when politics becomes heated. Emergencies should be treated as temporary departures from normal government, not opportunities to redefine it. Political opponents remain fellow citizens, and disagreement cannot be converted into disloyalty. Criminal law should judge conduct rather than political identity, with justice applied to individuals rather than groups. 

The point of winning power is to restore normal government, not to make emergency government permanent under new management.

Trump proved that the old order could be broken. The next generation must prove that something better can be built.

II. A Political Platform for a Reborn Conservative Movement

A conservative government must protect natural rights, preserve public order, defend the nation, enforce contracts, administer equal justice, and provide essential public goods that cannot be supplied effectively through voluntary action, and it must do these things competently. 

Limited government does not mean weak government.

The platform that follows is not a rigid catalogue from which no conservative may dissent. First principles are not the same as policy preferences. Conservatives may agree on the proper purpose of an institution while disagreeing about the best mechanism for achieving it. They may reach different empirical judgments about tax rates, benefit structures, trade restrictions, or regulatory design. A governing philosophy should establish the architecture within which those disagreements occur, and it should identify the ends government may legitimately pursue, the means it must reject, and the tests by which its actions should be evaluated.

A conservative government should not begin by asking how much it can do. It should ask what it must do, what it is constitutionally authorized to do, and how it can accomplish those duties without consuming the institutions it exists to protect.

1. Protect Natural Rights + Equal Citizenship 

The first obligation of government is not to give people rights. It is to protect rights people already possess.

Natural rights exist prior to government and therefore limit what government may legitimately do. Freedom of speech, conscience, religion, peaceful assembly and association, property, contract, self-defense, and the rights retained by the people under the Ninth Amendment are not favors granted by Congress, courts, presidents, or popular majorities. Government does not own them and therefore cannot distribute them according to political preference.

These rights belong to individuals.

That principle requires equality before the law. Government cannot divide citizens into moral castes according to race, sex, ancestry, religion, economic class, political affiliation, or some bureaucratically defined position within a hierarchy of oppression.

Past injustice does not create hereditary guilt. Neither does membership in a historically disadvantaged group establish an individual entitlement to compensation from people who committed no wrong.

Where actual harm can be demonstrated, justice should be specific. A person who was wrongfully injured should be able to identify the responsible party, demonstrate the injury, and pursue compensation through the legal system. Civil court exists specifically for this.

Government reparations based on ancestry, racial preferences, collective punishment, and systems that assign benefits or burdens according to group identity violate the 14th Amendment, detaching responsibility from conduct and transforming equality before the law into political accounting between demographic categories.

The same rule applies when government invents new positive rights that can exist only by compelling another person to provide them. A right to speak requires government to leave you free to speak. A supposed right to someone else’s labor or property requires the government to compel another person to provide it.

Government may choose, through legitimate democratic processes and within constitutional limits, to establish safety nets or public services. Those programs should be defended as policies rather than converted rhetorically into natural rights. Calling a government benefit a right does not remove its cost or the obligation to determine who must provide it.

Equal citizenship means one law, applied to individuals according to their actions. A reborn conservative movement should defend that principle without exception, including when abandoning it would temporarily benefit conservatives.

2. Restore Constitutional Government + Federalism

The first commitment of a conservative government must be to restore our constitutional structure.

The constitutional separation of powers depends on keeping each branch within its proper role. Congress makes the law, the president executes it and remains accountable for the executive branch, and the courts interpret it. Administrative agencies should not be allowed to collapse those functions into a single institution that writes rules, enforces them, and then judges alleged violations with only indirect accountability to voters. 

We also have to reject the “living document interpretation” of the Constitution, and a written Constitution can restrain government only if its words have meaning. The Constitution says what it says, based upon the definitions of words as understood when it was written. It does not say what unelected judges think it should say at any given moment in time. The “living document” view makes the Supreme Court become a legislature of last resort, and that is not the role of the court.

Constitutional change is sometimes necessary. The Founders knew that and created the amendment process accordingly.

The Commerce Clause should govern commerce among the states rather than serve as a general authorization to regulate every human activity that might have some eventual economic effect. The Necessary and Proper Clause should permit Congress to choose reasonable means of exercising powers actually granted to it, not to create new powers federal officials consider useful.

Stability in law matters, but precedent cannot permanently convert an unconstitutional power into a constitutional one simply through age.

The modern tendency to transfer difficult decisions away from elected representatives must be reversed. Congress has delegated broad authority because delegation allows members to claim credit for desirable goals while blaming agencies for unpopular consequences. This arrangement weakens accountability at every level. Citizens cannot effectively govern themselves when no identifiable official is responsible for the rules governing them.

Federalism must become an operating principle rather than a ceremonial reference to the Tenth Amendment. Authority should rest at the lowest level capable of exercising it effectively. Cities and counties should handle local matters. States should serve as the primary laboratories of domestic policy. The federal government should act only where the Constitution assigns national responsibility, or where a problem cannot be addressed effectively at a lower level.

Decentralization is not a philosophical preference. It is a corrective mechanism. When authority is distributed, failed policies can be identified, compared, abandoned, and replaced. Citizens can move between jurisdictions, and governors and legislatures can learn from one another. A national policy, by contrast, makes the entire country dependent on a single decision and allows failure to spread everywhere.

Federalism also reduces the stakes of national elections. When every major social question is decided in Washington, each presidential election becomes an existential contest. Citizens come to believe that losing control of the federal government means losing control over every important part of life. 

The federal government currently taxes money from citizens in the states, routes it through federal departments, attaches conditions to it, and then returns some of it to state and local governments through grants. Every step requires administrators, regulations, reporting systems, compliance personnel, audits, and duplicated state bureaucracies created solely to satisfy Washington. This arrangement also allows the federal government to influence policies it has no constitutional authority over.

That must change.

When a function belongs to the states, the federal government should stop taxing citizens to finance that function. Federal taxes should be reduced accordingly, leaving states free to raise the revenue necessary to provide whatever services their own citizens choose.

California cannot tell Japan what to do. It should not be able to tell Michigan either.

A state that wants a large public program should have the constitutional authority to create it where individual rights are protected, but it should also have to ask its own citizens to pay for it. A state that believes the same service can be provided more efficiently should be free to prove it. People can then compare systems and, ultimately, vote with their feet.

The constitutional balance requires a peaceful mechanism through which states can resist federal overreach without relying entirely on federal courts to restrain federal power. A conservative movement should therefore support a State Nullification Amendment.

The amendment should establish that two-thirds of the state legislatures have the constitutional authority to nullify any federal law, regulation, or ruling that they believe exceeds the federal government’s enumerated powers. This must be a collective state power rather than unilateral. A single state cannot simply announce that federal law no longer applies within its borders, but when two-thirds of the states agree that Washington has exceeded the authority those states granted it, the federal government should be forced to concede.

The amendment should also prevent federal authority from expanding through interpretation. No fundamentally new federal power should come into existence without the collective consent of two-thirds of the states.

This does not place individual rights at the mercy of state governments. The Bill of Rights and the protections incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment would remain restraints on state power. States would receive a structural mechanism for resisting federal expansion, but not authority to violate the natural and constitutional rights of their own citizens.

The purpose is to restore the missing check between the governments that created the federal system and the government they created, restoring final say in interpreting the Constitution away from the Supreme Court, and back to the states.

Restricting the Federal Government to its intended size and scope has another important benefit: it makes the United States potentially attractive for other like-minded nations to join. We should be open to that, as an expanded United States gives absolute military protection to new members while making the only government on Earth bound to protecting liberty even more powerful.

Emergency powers must also be constrained. Emergencies sometimes require rapid action, but temporary necessity has repeatedly become permanent authority. Every emergency declaration should expire unless affirmatively renewed by the legislature. If the emergency power is a fundamentally new federal role, it should require ratification by two-thirds of the states. 

Emergency programs, spending measures, regulatory waivers, and restrictions on liberty should include automatic expiration dates and public review.

Conservatives must apply these limits even when a conservative president holds office.

3. Dismantle the Permanent Government + Restore Accountability

The administrative state has grown into a semi-independent governing structure. Career officials write rules with the force of law, determine how those rules will be enforced, shape the information elected leaders receive, and maintain relationships with outside organizations that reinforce administrative priorities.

Expertise is necessary. Permanence without accountability is not.

The president is elected to lead the executive branch and must possess the authority to remove officials who obstruct lawful policy. Civil service protections should prevent arbitrary patronage and retaliation, but they should not create a class of officials empowered to govern against elected leadership. A bureaucracy that can resist every president it dislikes has ceased to be a neutral instrument of constitutional government.

Every federal agency should undergo recurring constitutional, financial, and performance audits. A permanent Department of Government Efficiency, or an institution serving that function, should make institutional review a continuous part of government.

The constitutional audit should ask whether each agency, program, regulation, and expenditure rests on legitimate federal authority. The financial audit should trace money through grants, contractors, state programs, nonprofit organizations, and administrative overhead, comparing stated purposes with measurable outcomes.

Programs that cannot demonstrate value should not continue just because they employ people, satisfy constituencies, or possess impressive names. Agencies that repeatedly produce results contrary to their purposes should be restructured, devolved, or abolished, and functions duplicated across departments should be consolidated or returned to the states.

The audit process must also examine incentives. An agency rewarded with larger budgets when a problem worsens has little institutional reason to solve the problem, and a regulatory body dominated by the industry it regulates may serve incumbents rather than consumers. 

The same accountability problem exists in public-sector compensation.

Collective bargaining in the private sector occurs between competing interests. Management cannot promise compensation indefinitely without eventually passing the cost to customers, reducing investment, losing market share, or going bankrupt. Reality eventually disciplines contractual agreements.

Public-sector bargaining is different. Government employees may help elect the same officials with whom their unions negotiate. Compensation can then be shifted into future pension obligations that will not become fully visible until after the politicians who approved them have left office.

That separates the decision from the consequence.

Public compensation must be fully transparent, honestly valued, and funded when it is promised. Governments should not conceal compensation through pension assumptions that make future obligations appear cheaper than they are, nor should elected officials be permitted to use deferred benefits to purchase present political peace while sending the bill to future taxpayers.

Collective bargaining cannot transfer legislative or budgetary authority away from elected government. Contracts should not make it practically impossible to discipline serious misconduct, remove chronically poor performers, restructure obsolete functions, or reform public institutions when those institutions fail.

Public employment exists to deliver public value. It cannot become a separate political economy in which the people negotiating compensation are insulated from the people required to pay for it.

Government should also end the practice of allowing outside activist organizations to drive policy through coordinated litigation. Agencies should not quietly develop legal arguments, pass them to favored groups, accept lawsuits based on those arguments, and then use consent decrees to impose policies elected officials never approved. Existing consent decrees should be reviewed regularly, and no decree should bind future administrations indefinitely without renewed judicial findings.

Transparency must follow public money. Organizations receiving federal grants should disclose the source, purpose, and use of those funds. Taxpayers should be able to determine when supposedly private advocacy is financed by the government it is lobbying.

Congress should also reconsider the assumption that an appropriation must always become an expenditure.

In ordinary circumstances, congressional appropriations should establish the maximum amount the executive branch is authorized to spend in carrying out the law, not a command that every authorized dollar be spent. The president must faithfully execute laws enacted by Congress. That does not mean executive agencies should be required to waste money Congress authorized as an upper limit.

Where Congress has created a specific legal entitlement or directed a specific expenditure, the executive must follow the law. Where Congress has authorized up to a particular amount to administer a program, the executive should possess reasonable authority to deliver the required outcome for less.

That authority should be exercised transparently, in good faith, and subject to congressional and judicial review. It should never become a presidential line-item veto.

The same constitutional limitation must follow federal money after it leaves government. Congress cannot evade constitutional restraints by financing an NGO, contractor, university, nonprofit organization, or other third party to perform acts government lacks authority to perform. If government lacks the authority to do something, it can’t outsource the power it does not have to a third party.

A permanent government-efficiency function should therefore follow federal money all the way through the system and ask not only whether the spending was wasteful, but whether the activity being financed was constitutionally legitimate in the first place.

The purpose is not to wage war on public employees. It is to restore a clear chain of authority, responsibility, and correction. Most employees respond to the systems in which they work. A government that produces unaccountable behavior must redesign the system rather than simply replacing one group of bureaucrats with another.

4. Restore Fiscal Discipline + a Stable Dollar

A government that cannot control its spending cannot remain self-governing. Debt allows the political class to distribute benefits without immediately collecting the taxes required to pay for them. It separates public desire from public cost and transfers obligations to people who did not vote for them.

The federal budget should be evaluated in relation to the economy that supports it. Nominal numbers matter less than spending, deficits, and debt as percentages of gross domestic product. That does not make large deficits harmless when the economy grows. It gives citizens an honest way to evaluate whether government obligations are becoming more or less sustainable.

Government spending cannot sustainably exceed the revenue capacity of the economy plus whatever modest monetary expansion is consistent with a stable currency. Historically that has been about 27 percent of the GDP plus another 2 percent for the target rate of inflation, or 29 percent. 29 percent is not a hard number—it is a historic marker based on current conditions.

Congress should adopt a binding path toward structural balance. That path need not require immediate balance during recession, war, or genuine national emergency, but ordinary operations should not depend on borrowing year after year. Spending growth must remain below sustainable economic growth long enough to reduce the government’s burden relative to the economy.

Entitlement reform must be honest and gradual. Promises made to people who organized their lives around them cannot be discarded, and neither can younger workers be forced indefinitely into bankrupt programs. Existing beneficiaries and those near retirement should be protected while future benefits, eligibility, contributions, and private ownership options are restructured around solvency.

The goal should be a retirement system in which individuals possess greater control over their savings, benefits are financially sustainable, and assistance remains available for people who cannot provide for themselves. A transfer program should not masquerade as an investment account, and political leaders should stop promising benefits without identifying who will bear the cost.

For younger workers, the long-term objective should be a transition from intergenerational transfer toward individual ownership.

Mandatory retirement contributions should increasingly flow into individually owned, diversified investment accounts that accumulate real assets over a worker’s lifetime. Those assets should belong legally to the worker rather than existing as a political promise of future benefits.

The accounts should be broadly diversified, portable, protected from political appropriation, and designed to avoid turning retirement policy into speculative gambling.

Those who do particularly well in these accounts can be taxed to provide, at a minimum, what the current system would have provided had it continued.

Monetary policy must also have a clear purpose. The Federal Reserve should have a single overriding mandate: preserve the long-term stability of the dollar.

Employment depends on millions of decisions made by employers, workers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and governments. Attempting to fine-tune employment through monetary expansion distorts prices, encourages debt, inflates assets, and transfers purchasing power away from people whose wages and savings cannot adjust quickly. We learned under Jimmy Carter that the dual-mandate does not work. End it now.

Monetary transparency should increase, and the relationship between federal borrowing and monetary policy should be made visible to the public. The central bank must not become a permanent mechanism for shielding Congress from the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility.

Interest rates are prices as well. In a functioning market they convey information about savings, time, risk, and demand for capital. When monetary authorities hold rates artificially away from those underlying conditions for long periods, the distortion moves into asset prices, leverage, housing, financial markets, and investment decisions.

The stock market is not the economy, and rising asset prices cannot substitute indefinitely for rising productive capacity or purchasing power.

Monetary policy should therefore stop treating asset inflation as evidence of prosperity. The Federal Reserve should not use monetary expansion to conceal fiscal insolvency, protect investors from ordinary losses, or turn every economic correction into another reason for permanently cheaper money.

The objective should not be to freeze prices. Individual prices must move as supply, demand, productivity, scarcity, and technology change. The objective is to preserve the integrity of the dollar as a measuring stick.

Wage growth relative to inflation should remain one of the most important measures of economic health. When wages consistently grow faster than prices, ordinary Americans become wealthier. When prices consistently grow faster than wages, they become poorer regardless of what the stock market or headline GDP says.

Sound money is not an abstract concern. It is a moral commitment to workers, savers, families, retirees, and future generations.

5. Tax for Revenue, Not Retribution 

Taxation is a means of funding legitimate government, not an instrument for expressing resentment. The proper question is not how much government can take from whichever group is currently unpopular. It is how government can raise the revenue necessary to perform its legitimate functions with the least damage to economic growth, individual liberty, investment, and production.

A tax rate is not the same thing as tax revenue. People change their behavior when incentives change. They move income, defer transactions, alter investments, create shelters, move businesses, relocate capital, or simply stop engaging in activities that no longer produce worthwhile returns.

A dollar earned and spent by one person becomes income to someone else, who may spend it again. Economic growth expands the number of taxable transactions throughout the system. A government can sometimes collect more revenue from a lower rate applied to a larger and more active economy than from a higher rate applied to an economy that has been slowed by taxation. The goal should be to identify rates that maximize sustainable long-term revenue while minimizing distortion.

That means rejecting wealth taxes designed primarily to punish accumulated success. Most large fortunes are not mountains of cash waiting to be seized. They are ownership interests in businesses, farms, factories, technology, and productive assets. Taxing those assets forces their owners to sell or restructure them and can reduce the value of the productive capacity upon which workers, retirees, and consumers depend.

It also means ending the political fiction that large government programs can be financed indefinitely by someone else. Ultimately the cost of government is borne by the productive economy. When politicians refuse to collect that cost honestly through taxes, they frequently collect it dishonestly through inflation.

Inflation is taxation without a bill. It reduces the value of wages and savings and falls hardest on people who own few appreciating assets. It is among the most regressive forms of taxation government can impose.

A conservative tax system will also recognize that businesses pay no taxes, but rather pass them on to consumers, employees, or investors, through higher prices, lower wages, or lower profits. Corporate taxes sound good to those who do not understand economics, and there is nothing wrong with taxing corporations as long as we do not tax them more than do other nations (in which case we will have fewer of them), but it is more efficient to tax consumers, employees, or investors directly than it is to hide a tax through corporations that we know will be shouldered by others.

A conservative tax system should therefore be simple enough to understand, broad enough to finance legitimate obligations, stable enough to allow long-term planning, and restrained enough to preserve growth.

Taxation should finance government. It should never become a substitute for justice.

6. Restore Competitive Markets + End Corporate Capture

Government should protect markets, but not manage outcomes within them. Its proper role is to enforce contracts, protect property, punish fraud, preserve competition, and prevent private actors from using political power to escape market discipline.

The United States does not suffer from an excess of genuine free enterprise. It suffers from a system in which the language of markets is often used to defend arrangements insulated from competition.

The economic philosophy underlying these reforms is what I have called Systemic Free-Market Realism. Markets are not machines to be programmed from above, but living systems created by free people interacting voluntarily. They depend upon natural rights, limited government, moral responsibility, honest information, and the rule of law. Government therefore has two legitimate economic functions: to protect the conditions under which markets operate efficiently, and to provide those genuine public goods that markets cannot efficiently provide themselves. Even in the second case, government should interfere with the functioning of markets as little as possible.

We tend to debate supply-side economics vs. demand-side economics, but both forms of subsidies are Keynesian in nature and in violation of the nature of a truly free market. We should reject Keynesian stimulus in all forms.

Corporate subsidies, targeted tax privileges, bailouts, regulatory carveouts, licensing restrictions, and government-created barriers to entry should be systematically eliminated. Firms should not be protected from failure just because their collapse would embarrass policymakers or impose losses on influential investors. When the cost of failure is shifted to taxpayers, profit no longer signals value creation. It signals access.

Occupational licensing should be limited to fields in which a clear and substantial public danger justifies it. Licensing requirements frequently protect existing providers by making entry expensive without meaningfully improving safety. People should not need political permission to perform ordinary work.

Regulation should focus on preventing identifiable harm rather than directing markets toward politically selected outcomes. Mandates and subsidies that manufacture demand distort prices and conceal whether consumers actually value what is being produced. When government selects industries for success, capital flows toward political favor rather than productive use.

Antitrust policy should protect competition rather than punish success. Size alone is not evidence of wrongdoing, but size combined with government privilege, collusion, exclusionary conduct, or control over essential channels of commerce requires scrutiny. The purpose is not to give regulators broad authority to redesign industries according to ideological preference. It is to ensure that incumbents cannot use either private power or government relationships to prevent competition.

At the same time, sometimes Antitrust enforcement really is necessary. No investment house should be allowed to manage more than a set amount of assets, and that amount is less than what BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street currently manage. The correct threshold must be determined and these companies must be broken up. When the CEO of BlackRock lists his job as controlling the corporations under his management – there needs to be enough competition in the investment world that such thinking would put him out of business.

Trade policy must distinguish free exchange from national dependency. Trade with reliable partners can increase prosperity and strengthen alliances. Dependence on adversarial governments for medicine, energy, military components, communications infrastructure, or strategically essential goods creates vulnerabilities markets may not price adequately as businesses do not bear the cost of disruption until it occurs.

A conservative trade policy should defend broad market exchange while preserving national security. Trade agreements do not create free trade so much as they create exceptions to it, and the longer a trade agreement is, the more exceptions it has. We should simply have a policy of reciprocity in which if a country trades freely with us, we will trade freely in return, but where we reserve the right to protect industries where we have a clear national security interest, and we reserve the right to respond in kind to violations of free trade committed by our trading partners.

The standard should remain value. Does a policy create a more competitive, resilient, innovative economy, or does it merely transfer wealth to a favored constituency? Truly free trade among friends benefits all parties involved.

7. Restore Housing Abundance + the Path to Ownership 

For millions of younger Americans, the failure of our economic system is visible every time they look at the price of a house.

Homeownership has been one of the primary mechanisms through which working and middle-class families accumulated wealth. A mortgage gradually converts housing expense into ownership. Property provides collateral, stability, inheritance, and a tangible stake in a community.

A system that permanently converts younger Americans into renters does more than raise their housing expenses. It changes the distribution of ownership throughout society.

Housing policy must begin with supply.

Local zoning restrictions, lengthy approval processes, unnecessary building mandates, climate rules, ESG requirements, and regulatory obstacles have made it increasingly difficult and expensive to build housing in many parts of the country. When government restricts supply while demand continues to rise, higher prices are the predictable market response. If a population grows, housing must be allowed to expand accordingly.

The first conservative response should be to remove government-created barriers to construction wherever those barriers do not serve a legitimate safety or property-rights purpose. This does not require Washington to become a national zoning board. Most land-use policy belongs at the state and local levels. It requires conservative governments at every level to ask whether each rule protects the public from an identifiable harm or merely makes housing more scarce.

Institutional ownership also requires scrutiny, particularly where the institutions acquiring homes benefit from monetary policy, regulatory preference, government guarantees, or access to capital unavailable to ordinary families. Large investors should compete under the same rules as everyone else rather than use government-created advantages to transform entire neighborhoods into financial portfolios.

The goal is not to punish investment. Rental housing is necessary and investment capital can create supply. The goal is to stop government from simultaneously restricting housing production and subsidizing or financially advantaging the institutions most capable of buying what little supply remains.

A conservative housing policy should be judged by a simple measure: are ordinary working families gaining or losing a realistic path toward ownership?

The answer cannot be permanent subsidies for ever-higher prices. We have tried that model in healthcare and higher education. Subsidizing demand while restricting supply simply moves prices higher.

The solution is abundance, competition, sound money, and a functioning path from work to ownership.

8. Pursue Energy Abundance Through Innovation 

Energy policy should make energy cleaner by making technology better. It should not make energy more expensive, as that makes people poorer.

Reliable and affordable energy is not a luxury. It is embedded in the price of transportation, food, housing, manufacturing, heating, cooling, medicine, agriculture, communication, and nearly every good and service people use. A policy that deliberately makes energy scarce makes almost everything else more expensive.

Environmental concerns are legitimate. Carbon dioxide levels can be measured, pollution can cause real harm, and environmental costs should not be ignored. The conservative error would be to answer ideological environmentalism with ideological indifference.

The proper response is technological.

Nuclear power can provide enormous quantities of reliable baseload electricity with minimal carbon emissions. Natural gas provides abundant energy with substantially lower emissions than coal. Carbon-capture technologies offer a mechanism for reducing emissions without requiring the destruction of industrial capacity or modern living standards.

A serious environmental policy would aggressively remove irrational obstacles to nuclear construction, allow abundant domestic natural-gas production, improve the infrastructure necessary to move energy efficiently, invest in carbon-capture technologies where they demonstrate value, and export cleaner American energy to countries still relying on dirtier fuels.

Different energy technologies should be judged according to total system performance rather than political symbolism. Cost, reliability, land use, storage requirements, transmission, resource dependence, resilience, environmental effects, and the ability to deliver energy when needed all matter.

Government should not hide those tradeoffs by subsidizing politically favored technologies while forcing competitors to absorb costs that are excluded from the comparison. Nor should environmental policy become the pretext for a surveillance state. Carbon allowances, personal energy quotas, mandatory digital identities, restrictions on ordinary travel, and systems that condition participation in society on approved consumption patterns are incompatible with a free people.

Prosperity and environmental stewardship are not opposites. We should seek a country with cleaner air, cleaner water, abundant energy, productive industry, technological innovation, and rising living standards.

Any environmental program whose solution requires permanent scarcity should be rejected outright.

9. Rebuild Education Around Parents, Knowledge + Citizenship

Education authority should be returned as close as possible to students and families. The federal government is not a national school board.

Federal involvement should be eliminated from primary education, funding should be made portable where federal money remains, and states should be encouraged to devolve authority to communities, schools, and parents. Families should be able to choose among public, charter, private, religious, vocational, online, and home-based education without being financially trapped in institutions that fail their children.

School choice is not a market reform. It is a civil-rights reform for families without the means to move to better districts or pay tuition in addition to taxes. No child should be assigned to a failing institution because of an address.

Choice must be accompanied by transparency. Parents should have access to curricula, reading lists, instructional materials, disciplinary policies, and meaningful measures of student learning. Schools should not conceal ideological instruction behind claims of professional expertise.

Higher education finance must be restructured so that institutions bear some responsibility for the value of the credentials they sell. Unlimited public lending allows universities to raise prices while transferring risk to students and taxpayers. Schools that encourage students to assume substantial debt for programs with little economic value should share the consequences when those loans fail.

The University of Michigan had a program in which qualified students could attend for free, and in return they contracted to give the university a percentage of their income for a period of time after graduation. The viability of such programs should be explored in every public university.

Accreditation should be opened to competition, alternative credentials should be recognized, and employers should remove degree requirements unrelated to actual job performance.

Returning authority to states and families requires eliminating the federal Department of Education. Education is not among the enumerated responsibilities of the federal government, and the country educated generations of Americans before the department was created. Its primary effect has been to place another administrative layer between the people delivering education and the families receiving it.

Decentralization must also change what schools measure.

Educational standards should describe competence. Literacy means the ability to read and understand written material, while numeracy requires a working command of mathematics. Scientific competence depends on understanding both established knowledge and the method by which claims are tested. Students should know history well enough to distinguish what happened from later interpretations of it and to judge those interpretations against the evidence. Civics should give them the same grounding in the Constitution, federalism, separation of powers, individual rights, and the responsibilities that come with citizenship. 

Students should learn personal and national finance. A population that does not understand debt, interest, inflation, taxation, and compound growth cannot govern a country whose political arguments revolve around those things.

We need to teach civics again. Students should know what our Constitution says and why it matters.

Educational disparities should be treated as information rather than automatic evidence of injustice. Different students, teachers, schools, and methods will produce different outcomes. Variation allows us to identify what works. Successful methods should be copied. Failed methods should be corrected or abandoned.

Teachers must also be competent in the subjects they teach. Training and professional development should focus first on mastery and teaching ability. Persistent inability to teach effectively cannot be protected indefinitely by credentials, administrative procedure, or seniority.

The objective is not equality of educational outcomes. It is a system capable of transmitting competence from one generation to the next.

Public education should form citizens capable of self-government, instead of producing clients of the state.

10. Restore Consumer Sovereignty in Healthcare

Healthcare cannot function as a normal market when prices are hidden, consumers are separated from payment, providers are protected from competition, and government repeatedly increases demand without increasing supply.

The conservative objective should not be to abandon people facing illness. It should be to build a system capable of providing care without making patients financially powerless and administratively dependent. Prices should be transparent before treatment whenever circumstances permit. Patients should be able to compare providers, facilities, pharmaceuticals, and insurance products. Contracts written in language ordinary people cannot understand should not be considered meaningful expressions of consumer choice.

Routine care and catastrophic risk should be treated differently. Insurance is most effective when it protects against large, unpredictable losses. When every transaction passes through a third party, administrative costs rise and price signals disappear. Patients should be able to purchase routine services directly, save in portable health accounts, and insure themselves against major expenses.

Competition across jurisdictions should be expanded, telemedicine should remain broadly available, and licensing rules that unnecessarily restrict the supply of qualified providers should be reconsidered. Scope-of-practice laws should protect patients rather than professional monopolies.

Insurance should also belong to individuals rather than jobs.

The tax code should treat individually purchased insurance and employer-provided insurance neutrally so that changing jobs does not automatically require changing health coverage. Insurance can then return toward its proper function, protecting people against large and unpredictable financial risks rather than serving as an administrative layer through which every ordinary medical transaction must pass.

Routine and predictable care can increasingly be purchased directly.

Patients can pay a fixed amount for continuing access to ordinary primary care, while health savings accounts can give individuals control over predictable expenses and catastrophic insurance protects against serious illness or injury.

The poor and uninsured should be assisted directly and transparently.

Routine care should not default to hospital emergency departments simply because federal law guarantees emergency stabilization. Emergency care is extraordinarily expensive and is poorly designed to manage chronic or routine conditions. States and communities can instead subsidize Direct Primary Care memberships, community clinics, chronic-care centers, and other lower-cost access points while preserving universal emergency stabilization.

Hidden cross-subsidies should also be exposed. When Medicare or Medicaid reimburses providers below the cost of treatment, the difference is shifted into private insurance premiums and cash prices. If taxpayers choose to subsidize care, that subsidy should appear openly in a public budget rather than being disguised inside someone else’s insurance bill.

Medical quality should be transparent as well. Hospitals and providers should publish comparable measures such as cost per case, infection rates, complication rates, and medical outcomes in formats ordinary patients can understand.

Equal treatment does not require identical amenities. Every patient requiring the same procedure should receive the same clinical standard of care, but a shared recovery room and a private suite need not be financed as though they are the same medical necessity. Comfort can vary without allowing medical competence to vary.

Finally, malpractice law should preserve accountability without rewarding defensive medicine. Liability should turn on actual negligence rather than the fact that medicine sometimes produces a bad outcome. Safe harbors for accepted protocols, qualified expert review, medical review panels, or specialized courts can reduce abusive litigation while protecting patients genuinely injured by negligence.

The Lean rule remains the same throughout: standardize outcomes where necessary, not every method used to achieve them.

Government programs should disclose their real costs and measure outcomes rather than enrollment. Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ care, and other public systems should be evaluated according to access, health outcomes, patient experience, long-term sustainability, and the dignity afforded to those who use them.

The safety net must remain. A civilized society does not allow people to die because they lack money. The existence of a safety net, however, does not require government to control the entire healthcare system. Public assistance can protect those in genuine need while preserving competition and choice for the broader population.

Healthcare policy should increase the agency of patients, the accountability of providers, and the honesty of prices.

11. Replace Permanent Dependency with Pathways to Agency

Government assistance is sometimes necessary, but its purpose should be to preserve dignity while restoring agency wherever restoration is possible.  Programs should distinguish temporary need, long-term disability, and behavioral dysfunction. Treating every recipient as though the same intervention is appropriate wastes resources and fails the people receiving assistance.

Benefits should be structured to avoid punishing work, marriage, savings, or family formation. A person should not lose more in assistance than he gains by accepting a raise or additional hours. Parents should not be placed in a stronger financial position by remaining unmarried. Modest savings should not disqualify a family from temporary help and thereby encourage it to remain assetless.

Able-bodied adults receiving long-term assistance should be expected to work, train, pursue education, care for dependents, or perform community service when suitable opportunities exist. These expectations should not be administered as humiliation. They should reflect the truth that participation, competence, and contribution are essential to dignity.

Administration should occur as locally as practical. States, counties, religious institions, charities, and community organizations possess different forms of knowledge and should be able to coordinate assistance without being forced into a single national model. Public programs should leave room for private organizations rather than crowding them out.

Success should be measured by restored independence, family stability, employment, recovery, and reduced need. Enrollment is not an outcome.

The same principles should guide homelessness, addiction, foster care, and reentry after incarceration. Housing without treatment will not solve addiction. Treatment without accountability will not create recovery. Punishment without pathways back into society does not solve crime. Each system must distinguish among problems rather than applying a single ideological answer to all of them.

Compassion without accountability becomes maintenance. Accountability without compassion becomes abandonment. Conservative policy must hold both together.

12. Protect Families + Preserve Civil Society

Government cannot create strong families, but it can stop weakening them.

Tax and benefit systems should be reviewed for marriage penalties. Parents should retain the primary authority to direct the upbringing, education, medical care, and moral formation of their children, subject to the government’s legitimate responsibility to prevent abuse and serious neglect.

Public institutions should not treat parental involvement as interference. Schools, healthcare providers, and government agencies act as temporary servants of families, not permanent replacements for them.

Adoption and foster-care systems should prioritize safe, durable family placement over bureaucratic process or ideological conformity. Religious and private organizations should be allowed to participate according to their convictions so long as children are protected and legal standards are met.

Government should also recognize the independence of religious institutions, charities, associations, and nonprofit institutions. Public funding should not be used to force private organizations to abandon their missions or beliefs. Religious liberty requires more than permission to worship privately. It protects the ability of people to organize institutions around their convictions and to carry those convictions into public life.

At the same time, religious liberty does not create a right to impose religious law on others. Government must protect freedom of conscience equally, including the freedom to adopt, reject, change, or leave a faith.

13. Protect Speech, Information + Scientific Integrity

The First Amendment prohibits government from censoring speech. Government should also be prohibited from accomplishing censorship indirectly through threats, regulatory pressure, coordinated requests, funding relationships, or informal demands made to private platforms.

Public officials should not be permitted to evade constitutional limits by inducing corporations to do what government cannot lawfully do itself. Communications between government agencies and media or technology platforms concerning moderation of lawful speech should be recorded, preserved, and subject to disclosure.

National security and law enforcement exceptions should remain narrow, specific, and reviewable. General claims of misinformation, extremism, public safety, or social harm cannot become licenses for suppressing political disagreement.

The rule of law also depends on stable language.

Government cannot hold people accountable under standards whose meanings change according to political fashion. Laws must define prohibited conduct clearly enough that ordinary citizens can understand what is required of them before government punishes them.

Terms such as violence, threat, harassment, discrimination, extremism, misinformation, public safety, and harm cannot be stretched indefinitely. Words can be cruel, dishonest, offensive, manipulative, or morally reprehensible without becoming violence. The distinction between speech and conduct must remain meaningful or the government eventually gains authority to suppress speech by redefining it as conduct.

Government should likewise avoid compelled ideological terminology. Public officials may define technical terms where administration genuinely requires precision, but government should not force citizens to affirm contested political or moral claims as a condition of employment, education, licensing, benefits, or participation in civic life.

A claim that conduct “could cause harm” cannot substitute for demonstrating what happened, who was harmed, how the defendant caused it, and which preexisting law was violated. Administrative convenience must not eliminate ordinary standards of causation and proof.

Government measurements require the same discipline. When agencies change definitions, classifications, statistical methods, or metrics, those changes should be disclosed clearly enough that citizens can determine whether reality changed or only the measurement did.

Language exists to describe reality. Once government gains the power to make reality conform to language, the law becomes whatever those controlling the definitions want it to be.

Government-funded research should be transparent. Data, methods, conflicts of interest, and limitations should be disclosed to the greatest extent compatible with privacy and legitimate security. Scientific agencies should separate research findings from policy recommendations and identify uncertainty honestly.

Emergency declarations should not suspend scientific disagreement. In fact, emergencies make disagreement more important because decisions are made rapidly with incomplete information. Policies adopted under emergency conditions should be revisited as evidence changes, and officials should acknowledge error rather than rewriting the history of their recommendations.

Whistleblowers who expose illegality, fraud, manipulated data, or serious public danger should receive meaningful protection. Public-records laws should be strengthened, and agencies should not evade transparency by conducting official business through private intermediaries.

Government advertising, grants, and subscriptions should not become hidden subsidies for politically aligned media. Public communication should inform citizens, not manipulate them.

The proper answer to false speech is generally more speech, better evidence, open criticism, and the protection of channels through which error can be corrected.

14. Protect Access to Financial + Communications Infrastructure 

Modern censorship does not always prohibit speech. It can make speech economically or technologically impossible.

The most visible speech platforms sit on top of a much larger infrastructure. Payment processors, banks, credit-card networks, donation systems, app stores, operating systems, cloud providers, hosting services, domain registrars, content-delivery networks, advertising exchanges, search engines, and other intermediaries can determine whether lawful organizations can function at all.

A writer who is technically free to publish but cannot receive payment has not been formally censored, but his ability to build an audience has been removed. A communications platform removed simultaneously from app stores, cloud infrastructure, and payment systems may remain legal while becoming practically impossible to operate.

The answer cannot be for government to dictate political viewpoints to private businesses. That would reproduce the same centralized system under conservative management. Government should instead protect competition, due process, and viewpoint neutrality where access to essential infrastructure has become a practical prerequisite for participation in ordinary economic or civic life.

No government agency should pressure a bank, payment processor, technology company, cloud provider, advertiser, or other intermediary to deny lawful service to someone government cannot directly punish.

Where institutions exercise extraordinary gatekeeping power, terms of service should be public and applied consistently. Customers removed from ordinary financial or communications infrastructure should receive notice of the rule allegedly violated and a meaningful way to challenge factual errors.

Where platforms can be shown to enforce their terms of service inconsistently, tort law should apply.

Lawful political belief should not become a substitute for credit risk, fraud, security risk, or unlawful conduct.

Government should also resist digital identity systems that combine financial access, political compliance, health information, carbon usage, location, or ideological scoring into a single mechanism through which participation in society can be granted or denied.

15. Keep Technology + Artificial Intelligence Under Human Authority

Technology should serve human beings. Human beings should not be reorganized to serve technological systems.

Government use of algorithms and artificial intelligence must remain subject to constitutional due process. No person should lose liberty, employment, benefits, licenses, access to essential services, or legal standing solely because an automated system produced a score or recommendation.

Consequential decisions must include meaningful human review by an identifiable official who possesses authority to alter the outcome and bears responsibility for it. Citizens should be told when an automated system materially influenced a decision affecting them and should have access to an understandable explanation and appeals process.

Algorithms used by government should be auditable for accuracy, bias, security, and reliability. Proprietary claims cannot become a shield when private software exercises public power.

The same concern extends beyond government systems.

Artificial intelligence increasingly influences hiring, search, news distribution, lending, insurance, education, communication, and the information people encounter before they make decisions. A system can shape society without possessing formal government authority.

AI models learn patterns from training material and then respond to incentives created by feedback systems, developers, evaluators, safety rules, and the institutions that define acceptable outputs. Transparency matters.

Companies developing consequential artificial intelligence should disclose enough about the broad sources, filtering standards, feedback processes, and governing assumptions used in training that users can understand what kinds of bias the system may contain. Trade secrets and proprietary code need not automatically become public, but “the algorithm decided” cannot become an impenetrable answer to legitimate questions about systematic discrimination or ideological manipulation.

The people creating feedback loops matter as much as the data. If everyone evaluating a model shares the same worldview, the model can mistake ideological consensus among its trainers for objective truth. Intellectual and disciplinary diversity should thus be treated as a mechanism for error correction rather than as a political quota.

AI developers should also build meaningful systems for identifying and correcting demonstrated bias. When users expose recurring factual or ideological errors, those corrections should improve the system rather than disappear into an opaque process.

Competition among AI systems is essential. Government should never designate a single politically acceptable model, ideology, or information standard to which private systems must conform.

If we reward accuracy, correction, openness, and usefulness, it can become an extraordinary instrument of human flourishing. If we reward conformity, it will become extraordinarily good at conformity.

Mass surveillance should be rejected. The fact that technology makes comprehensive monitoring possible does not make it constitutional. Government access to private communications, location data, biometric information, financial activity, or personal records should require lawful authority proportionate to the intrusion.

A conservative government should also resist technological central planning. Innovation occurs when people are free to experiment, compete, fail, and improve. Regulation should focus on concrete harms, fraud, coercion, privacy violations, and violations of rights rather than attempting to determine in advance which technologies should succeed.

Children deserve particular protection from systems designed to exploit attention, dependency, or immature judgment. The proper balance among parents, platforms, states, and federal authority will require continuing debate, but the governing principle should remain clear: technology must not dissolve parental authority, human agency, or constitutional rights.

The future should be technologically advanced but recognizably human.

16. Restore Citizenship, Borders + National Sovereignty

A nation that cannot control entry into its territory cannot meaningfully govern itself. Border security is not hostility toward immigrants. It is a prerequisite for lawful immigration, public confidence, and national sovereignty.

The federal government should secure the border, enforce immigration law, maintain accurate entry and exit systems, and remove people who have no lawful right to remain after due process is complete. Sanctuary policies that deliberately obstruct lawful federal enforcement should not be subsidized by federal taxpayers.

Legal immigration should serve the interests and capacities of the nation while preserving America’s historic ability to welcome people who wish to become Americans. The number and composition of immigrants admitted are legitimate subjects of democratic decision-making. They should not be determined by corporate demand for labor, activist litigation, administrative discretion, or the accumulated consequences of unenforced law.

Immigration levels must also remain within the country’s capacity to assimilate newcomers. Assimilation is not automatic. It is a process, and like every process it has a capacity. That capacity depends on the strength of the host culture, the institutions available to transmit it, the pace of immigration, geographic concentration, language acquisition, schools, housing, labor markets, civic organizations, and the expectations placed on newcomers after arrival.

Below the assimilation threshold, newcomers enter a confident culture and gradually become part of it. Above that threshold, the process can reverse. Parallel institutions become self-sustaining, neighborhoods become permanently separated, political appeals increasingly occur through group identity, and administrative systems expand to manage conflicts culture previously resolved informally.

Annual immigration levels should be determined partly by demonstrated assimilation capacity rather than by the assumption that more immigration is automatically better or automatically worse.

This is not an argument for ethnic uniformity. American assimilation has never required Americans to eat the same foods, attend the same religious, possess the same ancestry, or erase every tradition brought from somewhere else. We do however require a common civic framework.

English should become the shared public language. Constitutional law must remain supreme. Men and women receive equal protection. Speech and conscience remain free. Citizens may change religions, reject religions, criticize religions, and marry outside them. Violence and coercion cannot be excused through cultural tradition.

Immigration policy should also stop treating population growth as a substitute for reforming insolvent entitlement systems. Importing more future taxpayers merely postpones the structural problem when those taxpayers will eventually retire as well.

The purpose of immigration policy is to strengthen an American nation capable of absorbing new Americans.

The number should follow that purpose.

Enforcement must remain humane and constitutional. The government should distinguish violent criminals, security threats, recent unlawful entrants, long-established residents, children brought into the country by adults, and people with plausible claims for protection. Distinctions are not weakness. They are evidence that law is being applied intelligently.

Assimilation should become an explicit objective of immigration policy. Naturalization should require meaningful knowledge of English, American history, constitutional government, and civic responsibilities. New citizens should affirm the supremacy of the Constitution and equal civil law.

No system of religious, tribal, or customary authority may supersede American law. Freedom of religion protects Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, and every other person equally. It also protects individuals inside religious communities from coercion, including the freedom to criticize, convert, or leave.

Citizenship should never become ancestry-based. America is a nation built around a constitutional civilization that people from many backgrounds can join. The alternative to open borders is not ethnic nationalism. It is ordered citizenship.

Foreign governments and international institutions should not determine domestic policy outside the constitutional treaty process. Cooperation among nations can be valuable, but sovereignty cannot be quietly transferred through administrative agreements, transnational regulatory networks, or judicial claims never approved by the American people.

A national government must first answer to its own citizens.

17. Re-establish Equal Justice + Public Order

Liberty cannot survive where government cannot protect people from violence, theft, intimidation, and disorder. Neither can it survive where law enforcement becomes an instrument for punishing political enemies.

A conservative criminal-justice platform should begin with equality before the law. The identity, ideology, wealth, political affiliation, or institutional influence of an offender should neither shield him from accountability nor expose him to selective prosecution.

Equality before the law must apply upward as well as downward. Public office cannot become immunity from ordinary criminal law. Officials who knowingly falsify evidence, conceal fraud, obstruct legitimate investigations, protect criminal conduct, or abuse public authority for partisan purposes should be investigated under the same legal standards applied to everyone else and prosecuted when the evidence warrants it. 

Prosecutorial power must be constrained by clear law, transparent standards, due process, and judicial review. Broad statutes should not be stretched to criminalize conduct that was not clearly unlawful when committed. Civil penalties, licensing actions, tax investigations, and criminal charges should not be coordinated to destroy political opponents.

The same standard applies to police. Communities need effective law enforcement, particularly in neighborhoods where ordinary residents bear the highest cost of crime. Police should possess the authority and resources necessary to protect the public, but that authority must be accompanied by training, supervision, evidence, and accountability.

Policing should remain primarily local because conditions vary and accountability is strongest near the people being policed. Federal involvement is appropriate where the Constitution assigns jurisdiction, where crimes cross state lines, or where local institutions violate constitutional rights. It should not become a national mechanism for directing ordinary law enforcement.

Criminal justice must distinguish among dangerous offenders, nonviolent offenders, addicts, the mentally ill, juveniles, and people capable of rehabilitation. Violent offenders should be incapacitated when necessary to protect the public. Nonviolent offenders should not be placed in environments that make them more dangerous.

Sentencing, bail, diversion, and rehabilitation policies should be evaluated by outcomes rather than ideology. Do they reduce violence, protect victims, discourage repeat offending, and restore people capable of returning to society? Policies that produce more crime should be corrected regardless of whether they were promoted as compassionate or punitive.

Victims should not disappear from the system. Their safety, losses, and dignity matter. Restitution should receive greater emphasis where it is possible, and communities should not be asked to absorb predictable disorder in the name of theories developed far from its consequences.

Public order is not authoritarianism. It is one of the conditions under which ordinary people can exercise liberty.

18. Defend the Nation Through Strength Guided by National Interest

The United States requires a military capable of deterring enemies, defending its territory, protecting its people, and fulfilling legitimate commitments. Military weakness invites conflict. Military power without strategic restraint creates conflicts that have no clear relationship to national security.

A conservative foreign policy should combine strength with disciplined purpose.

Before military force is used, political leaders should identify the national interest involved, the objective being pursued, the authority under which action is taken, the likely costs, the conditions for success, and the means by which the commitment will end. Vague claims about credibility, democracy, international order, or humanitarian concern cannot substitute for strategy.

Congress must recover its constitutional responsibility for war. Presidents require sufficient authority to respond to immediate threats, but prolonged military action should require legislative approval and public accountability.

Alliances should be reciprocal. The United States should honor its commitments, but allies must contribute meaningfully to their own defense. Security guarantees that encourage dependence or reckless behavior should be restructured.

The military should be organized around readiness, lethality, logistics, technological superiority, discipline, and the care of those who serve. It should not become a laboratory for domestic social theories or a substitute for diplomacy, development, and trade.

National resilience also requires secure energy, communications, transportation, manufacturing, food, medicine, and defense supply chains. A nation unable to produce essential military components or sustain its population during disruption is not secure even if its weapons are advanced.

Foreign policy should distinguish other nations’ interests from our own. America can defend its values without assuming responsibility for governing every society, resolving every conflict, or remaking every culture. Prudence is not isolationism. It is the recognition that power is finite and consequences are real.

19. Govern Through Lean Systems, Measurement + Correction 

The preceding platform will fail if it is implemented through the same institutional habits that produced the problems it seeks to correct.

It begins by identifying purpose. Once purpose is clear, we identify the critical measurements that tell us whether the system is achieving it. Changes should then be evaluated against those measurements, preferably through pilot programs, comparisons between jurisdictions, or other mechanisms that allow us to separate improvement from coincidence.

Government should only keep changes that improve the system.

That sounds obvious, but it represents a radical departure from the way government normally operates. Laws are usually judged by intentions, constituencies, spending levels, or the political cost of repeal. Once enacted, programs develop employees, contractors, interest groups, and beneficiaries whose livelihoods depend on continuation. Failure then becomes an argument for more funding rather than evidence that the intervention should be changed.

Lean reverses that incentive.

In Lean Government, the citizen is the customer rather than the raw material of government. Value and quality must therefore be defined from the citizen’s perspective, with liberty, security, constitutional rights, competent service, and the least necessary burden treated as measures of quality. 

Major policies should begin with predetermined measures of success and failure. Those measurements should be publicly available, tracked over time, and resistant to political redefinition. Where possible, changes should be introduced incrementally so that their effects can be distinguished from background variation. If a policy produces measurable improvement, it can be expanded. If it does not, it should be modified or reversed.

Frontline knowledge matters because the people closest to a system often see problems long before distant administrators do. Teachers, nurses, police officers, and local officials work directly with the conditions that higher-level bureaucracies try to govern through reports and abstractions. A healthy system therefore allows information to travel upward from the people experiencing the consequences of policy, rather than assuming that wisdom flows only from the top down. 

The operating rule should be simple: standardize legitimate outcomes, but do not unnecessarily standardize methods.

Government should determine what must be achieved where it possesses legitimate authority to do so, measure whether it was achieved, and leave as much room as possible for people closest to the work to discover better ways of achieving it.

Government data should be understandable to citizens. Budgets, performance reports, regulatory effects, debt projections, and program outcomes should not be buried in formats only specialists can interpret. Transparency that technically releases information while making it practically unusable is not transparency.

Conservative leaders must also be willing to correct their own policies. No philosophy eliminates uncertainty. No platform can anticipate every consequence. Systems thinking does not promise perfect foresight. It creates institutions capable of recognizing error before error becomes permanent.

This is where statesmanship differs most clearly from ideology. Ideologues treat evidence of failure as evidence that their preferred policy was not applied aggressively enough. Statesmen ask whether the policy served its purpose.

The conservative standard should be value. Did government protect liberty? Did it preserve order? Did it strengthen the capacity of citizens and institutions to act? Did it solve the problem it claimed to address? Did it create new dependencies, distortions, or concentrations of power? Could the same result have been achieved at a lower level of government or outside government entirely?

A government that cannot answer these questions should not ask for more power.

From Revolt to Renewal

Conservative renewal begins with the recognition that human beings possess inherent dignity, natural rights, moral agency, and responsibilities that exist before government. Constitutional limits matter because power eventually escapes the intentions of those who first exercise it, while decentralized authority provides the feedback and correction that centralized systems lack. Markets should be defended as mechanisms of voluntary value creation, but not confused with the interests of corporations seeking protection from competition or the consequences of failure.

That same philosophy places the family at the center of social life and preserves civil society as the space between the individual and the state. Citizenship carries reciprocal obligations rather than just legal status. Technological progress should be welcomed without allowing machines or systems to replace human judgment and responsibility, and national loyalty should rest on shared citizenship and constitutional principles rather than ancestry, tribal identity, or devotion to a political personality.

This conservatism will not promise to eliminate suffering, perfect mankind, equalize every outcome, or make political conflict disappear. Those are utopian promises, and utopian promises are eventually enforced through coercion.

It offers something both more modest and more ambitious: a society in which people possess the freedom and capacity to direct their own lives; families and communities are strong enough to solve many problems before government intervenes; markets reward value rather than influence; institutions are accountable to their purposes; and government is powerful enough to perform its legitimate duties but constrained from becoming master of the people it serves.

Let us be more than politicians seeking the next victory.

Let us be statesmen.

On July 26, Boy George posted a new song, “We Will Dance Again,” on X and Instagram. The Hebrew title appeared beside the English one; the only caption was “#Shalom.” In the pop-reggae track, he recalled the Nova festival massacre, rejected the accusation that Israel is committing genocide, and rebuked musicians whose support for “Palestine” leaves the victims of October 7 out of the story. Then came the line that made his position impossible to soften: “I stand with the Jews.”

George put the song into public circulation under his own name and defended it when the denunciations arrived. The lyric itself rejects bravery: George sings that he does not feel brave and needs to “behave like a human.” George later acknowledged that the track was created with AI, which he called “AI for good.” The position it expressed, and his decision to publish and defend it, were unequivocally his. The importance of the episode lies as much in publication as in composition. Sympathy kept private would have cost him nothing. By making the song public, he turned it into conduct.

The safer response was readily available. George could have expressed sorrow for October 7, then moved at once to a denunciation of Israel. This has become the approved syntax of celebrity compassion: Jewish suffering is briefly acknowledged before Israeli guilt takes possession of the argument. The initial sympathy merely licenses the accusation that follows. George refused that sequence. He restored October 7 to the center of the story and challenged performers who speak confidently about Palestinian suffering while remaining silent about murdered and abducted Israelis. His declaration contained no polite “yes, but.” He stood with Jews without first requiring them to dissociate themselves from Israel or accept its condemnation as the price of sympathy.

George later explained what had compelled him to write. At the Nova Exhibition in London, he spoke with Michael and Lisa Marlowe, whose 26-year-old son Jake, a British-Israeli musician working as an unarmed security guard, was murdered at the festival. According to George, Jake died while trying to help others. He also spent time with survivor May Hayat, whose best friend was murdered, and stood with her before the photographs of those killed. Nova was “a mirror of my world,” George said. As a DJ, he had performed at comparable festivals, including in Israel: “I could have been there.” The recognition was immediate and personal: these were dancers and music lovers from a world he knew. The song carried that encounter into the public sphere.

George had listened to people for whom October 7 was neither a slogan nor a preface to another argument. His refusal to push their suffering aside began there. To remain silent, or to bury what he had heard beneath an acceptable qualification, would have meant treating their experience as politically inconvenient. Instead, he made the song for them and made their memory part of his public stand.

The Verdict He Refused

The song is blunt because George refuses a hierarchy organized by identity. Within it, Palestinian suffering settles the moral verdict before argument begins; Israel is fixed as the oppressor, and gay public figures are expected to repeat that verdict. George disputes the judgment on the war and the claim upon his allegiance. “You say genocide, I say war,” he sings. “Does it get ugly? You bet it does.” He rebukes musicians who wave Palestinian flags while leaving the rape, murder, and abduction of October 7 outside their account. Yet the title looks toward an end to the war: “We Will Dance Again.” George later described the song as pro-peace and expressed grief for innocent lives. He considers the war terrible and rejects the accusation of genocide. That judgment requires a serious answer; it cannot honestly be translated into indifference toward civilians. Nor can the song’s political argument be removed to uncover a more acceptable message beneath it. The act consists precisely in George’s refusal to separate remembrance of October 7 from his defense of Israel and his public solidarity with Jews.

George’s description of the conflict as a war cannot be understood if the people Israel was still trying to bring home, or the armed movement it was fighting, are removed from view. Through the Marlowes, May Hayat, and the photographs at Nova, October 7 was no abstraction standing behind the subsequent fighting. George had encountered its consequences in people whose world of music, friendship, and ordinary life he immediately recognized as his own.

The assault to which he was responding was directed extensively against civilians. At Nova and in residential communities, people were deliberately killed, abducted, and abused. Sexual violence and sexualized humiliation were used during the attack and against captives. Silenced No More, the Civil Commission’s extensive investigation of sexual violence on October 7 and in captivity, documents recurring patterns of rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, mutilation, and other forms of sexual abuse across multiple locations and stages of the attack and captivity. Its researchers concluded that sexual and gender-based violence was not incidental to the assault but formed part of its method of terror.

Humiliation was also made into spectacle. Assailants recorded parts of the attack, and Palestinian armed groups distributed footage through their own chat channels. Victims and captives were filmed, displayed, and paraded. The partially clothed body of Shani Louk, murdered at Nova, was driven through Gaza before cheering onlookers. Families were attacked through their bonds to one another as well: parents and children were killed or abducted together, relatives separated, others left to discover what had been done to someone they loved. Legal scholar Cochav Elkayam-Levy and her colleagues have proposed the term “kinocide” for this weaponization of family relationships.

These were the realities behind the photographs before which George had stood. He had met the parents of a murdered son and a woman who survived the festival. When he said, “I could have been there,” the identification was concrete.

Nor did the degradation end when the captives disappeared into Gaza. The hostages were people Israel was trying to bring home. The great majority—as even the systemically anti-Israel Amnesty International had to acknowledge—were civilians, among them babies, toddlers, children, elderly people, and adults of every age. They were held incommunicado without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross—which itself never insisted on visiting them. Released hostages described beatings, deprivation of food and water, confinement in darkness, sexual assault, forced nudity, and other humiliating treatment. Some hostages were murdered by their captors; others died during the captivity into which they had been violently forced. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also withheld information about who was alive, who was dead, and where captives were being held, extending the ordeal to their families.

Their suffering, too, was made public. Armed groups released images of captives injured, frightened, emaciated, or pleading for their lives, and staged obscene, choreographed release ceremonies—in which Red Cross officials openly participated. In one video released in 2025, an emaciated Evyatar David was shown in a tunnel digging what he said would be his own grave after describing an extremely limited food intake. The hostage was thereby made into both captive and spectacle.

Critics of Israel’s campaign proposed ceasefires, negotiated exchanges, and more limited military operations. Exchanges did bring some hostages home. They did not return all of them, with some never seeing Israel again. Nor did a temporary ceasefire answer how Hamas, then still armed and in power, would be prevented from carrying out its promise to repeat the massacre. Any serious alternative had to address both obligations Israel faced: recovering the hostages and protecting its people from another attack. A proposal that secured neither would have required Israel to accept the consequences of October 7 while the force responsible remained capable of renewing them.

To reduce these people to “the hostage issue” is already to lose something essential. Their captivity was part of the reality George refused to erase when he sang, “You say genocide, I say war.”

The withdrawal of ordinary human recognition did not remain confined to the scene of the attack. Within days of October 7, red and white “Kidnapped” posters began appearing in New York, London, and other cities, each carrying the photograph, name, and age of someone taken into Gaza. Some showed children and elderly people. Almost immediately, the posters themselves became contested objects. In New York, some were torn down within minutes of being put up; similar removals occurred elsewhere.

A ripped poster is obviously not comparable to murder, rape, or torture. Its significance is narrower, and revealing. Each poster asked passers-by to recognize that a particular person had been kidnapped. Yet even that minimal recognition became politically objectionable. Once the face was identified as Jewish or Israeli, sympathy itself could become conditional.

This is the atmosphere to which George’s song belongs. He had met bereaved parents and a survivor, and had stood before the photographs of the dead. He refused to let a political category erase the person in front of him.

There is a name for that erasure: dehumanization. A murdered young woman becomes “an Israeli.” A kidnapped baby becomes part of the conflict. A terrified hostage becomes a bargaining chip. Identity comes first, and the ordinary human response to suffering is suspended.

George’s answer is expressed through the very word that dehumanization denies. “I just need to behave like a human,” he sings. The murdered festival-goer becomes again someone who had been dancing. The hostage becomes someone’s child or parent. Jews who tell him they feel abandoned become people whose fear he is willing to hear. When George says, “I stand with the Jews,” he restores them to the ordinary human recognition that the category had displaced.

His refusal of the word genocide belongs to the same resistance. “You say genocide, I say war” does not deny the terrible suffering of civilians. It refuses to treat as settled a characterization that, to be generous, remains legally and factually contested.

Genocide is a specific legal category. Under the Genocide Convention, the prohibited acts must be committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. The International Court of Justice has issued binding provisional measures in South Africa’s case against Israel; the case remains in written proceedings, and the Court has not ruled on the merits. Roy K. Altman’s Israel on Trial is useful because it returns the accusation to elementary evidentiary questions: burden of proof, corroborationm and chain of custody. Massive civilian suffering, however terrible, does not by itself establish genocidal intent.

The legal framework is also asymmetrical in one important respect: the ICJ adjudicates disputes between states, so Hamas cannot be brought before it as a respondent. Yet Hamas’s own ideological record contains explicit eliminationist material. Its 1988 founding covenant invokes a tradition (hadith) envisioning Muslims fighting and killing Jews. Its 2017 policy document distinguished its conflict with Zionism from a conflict with Jews as Jews, but neither recognized Israel nor renounced armed struggle. After October 7, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad publicly promised repetitions of the attack until Israel was eliminated. George’s refusal is therefore larger than a dispute over one legal term. He will not accept a moral vocabulary in which the people massacred, violated, and abducted on October 7 disappear from view while Israel is treated as presumptively guilty of the gravest accusation available.

The backlash showed how quickly George’s human judgment was converted back into groupthink guilt. Martyn Ware, co-founder of Heaven 17 and formerly George’s friend, called the track “an overtly pro-genocide, anti-Palestinian piece of musical propaganda” and told him he should be ashamed. PinkNews described it as a song that denies the “genocide” in Gaza. Once the accusation of genocide is presented as established fact, rejecting it can itself be recast as moral complicity.

George was especially struck by the backlash to the song. His response was consistent with a principle he had stated before: queer people are not a political monolith. It exposed another assumption he refused: that a gay icon inherits a prescribed political position, and that dissent from it amounts to betrayal. The collective struggle that secured greater freedom for gay people did not give any movement ownership of his judgment.

That matters because George’s act was not a departure from the independence that made him a cultural figure in the first place. He was being told, in effect, that one identity should determine what he was permitted to see in another, and he refused.

The controversy also entered George’s professional life. Four days after he released the song, his manager, Paul Kemsley, announced that George would no longer appear as King Herod in the London Palladium production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Kemsley did not attribute the withdrawal to the song, so no causal claim can be made. George nevertheless acknowledged that the controversy was straining his friendships, writing that he was “even falling out with Jewish friends.” Whatever lay behind the Palladium withdrawal, the controversy had now become entangled with his professional life. He did not retract the song.

The Conscience of a Gay Icon

On September 23, 1982, Culture Club appeared on the BBC’s Top of the Pops with “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” then number 38 on the British chart. George’s long braids, makeup, loose clothing, and soft voice confounded the familiar image of a male pop singer. Viewers wanted to know whether he was a man or a woman; George left them with the uncertainty. He offered no manifesto and asked no permission to appear on his own terms. The single subsequently reached number one. This was a Britain in which sex between men had been only partly decriminalized 15 years earlier and remained governed by an unequal age of consent. George became a gay icon partly because his public presence enlarged what millions of people could imagine a man could look like and be.

Nearly four and a half decades later, the attempted prescription concerns humanity rather than sexuality. George is no longer being told how a man should look or whom he should love. He is being told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, whose suffering a gay icon should recognize as truly human, and what political conclusions he should draw from it. The continuity lies in his response. He still refuses to let a category decide him in advance. The freedom that gay emancipation helped secure does not make his conscience the property of gay politics.

George has said as much himself. In 2025, objecting to the treatment of queer people as a political unit, he said, “We’re not a thing,” and added, “Everybody is diverse because nobody is like anybody else.” His independence cannot easily be recruited by either political side. He has defended trans people and publicly quarreled with J. K. Rowling over her views. During the controversy over the song, he described himself as a “Jew-loving, trans-hugging queer hippy.” The phrase is comic, but exact. George forms his opinions separately, with little regard for the coalition in which each one may place him. His support for Jews cannot plausibly be explained as conversion to a conservative camp. It belongs to his longer refusal of ideological conscription.

That refusal also places George at odds with a powerful current within his own professional world. Kneecap has appeared in footage in which “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” was shouted from the stage, although the group later denied supporting either organization. Bob Vylan led a Glastonbury crowd in chanting “Death, death to the IDF!” Roger Waters, meanwhile, said in a July 2024 Piers Morgan interview that there was “no evidence” women had been raped on October 7. When a clip resurfaced in 2026, George’s answer was blunt: “Go to the Nova Exhibition.”

These examples matter because George is speaking from inside the same cultural world. Compassion for Palestinian suffering has, in parts of that world, coexisted with rhetoric that praises or excuses those who attacked Israelis, while the rape, murder, abduction, and humiliation of October 7 are minimized, qualified, or pushed aside. George refuses that hierarchy of human worth. The culture that once celebrated him for resisting prescribed identities now has difficulty tolerating one of his independent judgments when the people beside whom he chooses to stand are Jews.

Human Decency

The most important line in the song may be its simplest: “I don’t feel brave, I just need to behave like a human.” George refuses the heroic interpretation of what he has done, describing it as a minimum obligation. Someone has been murdered, raped, kidnapped, humiliated, or bereaved; the first response should be to the human being before the category.

That is why “I stand with the Jews” carries more weight than a declaration of political allegiance. George had met Michael and Lisa Marlowe, heard about Jake, spoken with May Hayat, and stood before the photographs at Nova. He had encountered real, grieving, hurting, haunted people. Once he had seen them, he would not turn them back into abstractions in order to remain in good standing with his peers.

Politics remains part of the argument: war, civilian suffering, governments, armed groups, international institutions, and the media through which the conflict is interpreted. But George’s intervention begins at a more fundamental, crucial level. Political judgment has already failed when the suffering of one group must first pass an ideological test before it can be received as human suffering.

This is why Boy George matters now. He did something that should have required no courage at all. At a moment when Jewish, Israeli, and non-Jewish victims who had lived peacefully in Israel could be pushed behind a political category, he saw them as his fellow humans.

The Nazis called Jews Untermenschen—“subhumans.” The historical circumstances are entirely different, but George’s answer reaches for the very word dehumanization denies: human.

“I stand with the Jews.”

“I just need to behave like a human.”

The two statements should never have needed to become connected.

In the past few months, I have received several pro-life emails from the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) alleging that California’s recently passed law AB 2223—which removed the 24-week limit on abortions, including legal protection for the fetus—authorized aborting newborns up to 28 days after birth. In response to such allegations, leftist outlets such as Reuters, AP, and FactCheck.org asserted that, in the words of Factually.co, the bill as introduced sought “to shield people from civil or criminal liability” tied to “pregnancy outcome[s], including miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion or ‘perinatal death.’”

This was language intended by the sponsor and allies to protect against “prosecution for pregnancy loss” and self-managed abortions. The sponsor clarified the intent and filed amendments to narrow the language to perinatal death “due to a pregnancy-related cause.”  The ACLJ contended that changing “prenatal” to “perinatal” opened up a possible interpretation of allowing post-partum killing of the infant. The critics held that the ACLJ’s assertion was based on intentionally misinterpreting ambiguous language in the bill.

Actually, as I see it, neither interpretation is needed to evaluate the morality of AB2223. Removing the 24-week limit authorizes aborting viable infants, which the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a life-long Democrat, characterized as infanticide.

It Is well known that, as a result of advances in medicine, babies born in the seventh month of gestation have excellent prospects for survival. Moreover, only China and North Korea allow abortions up to the baby entering the birth canal. By comparison, member states of the infamously debauched European Union have restrictions on abortion ranging from 10 to 16 weeks, with 13–14 weeks being the most common (that is, the first trimester). In other words, late-term abortions in Europe could be justifiably regarded as criminal acts. As a non-lawyer, I could envision voluntary manslaughter as an appropriate charge.

At the other end of life, assisted suicide and even euthanasia are becoming more socially acceptable. According to CBN, 16,499 deaths in Canada (about one of every 20) were facilitated by Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), Canada’s euphemism for euthanasia. While the government defends the program, maintaining it to be a sacred freedom of a humane society, many citizens say otherwise:

Nearly one-fifth of the 23,000 people who requested MAID, had a “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” such as diabetes, autoimmune conditions, and chronic pain, and were denied assisted suicide. But about 4% of people who were approved for assisted suicide did not have a terminal diagnosis or reasonably foreseeable death. Nearly 23% of people overall reported “isolation or loneliness” as a reason for seeking euthanasia. Medical practitioners reported that about 50% of people requested it because of being a “perceived burden on family, friends, or caregivers.”

Other concerns were that MAID may be expanded to include the mentally ill and “mature minors,” and that disabled people are being pressured to join the program. Sounds to me like a way to reduce spending on socialized medicine. It echoes the 1976 movie Logan’s Run, in which a future society enforces population control for environmental reasons by putting to death everyone who turns 30.

Another aspect of societal decay is the increasing justification of crime. San Francisco virtually decriminalized shoplifting of goods valued at less than $950 to alleviate poverty at the expense of businesses. It also tolerates homeless people living, urinating, defecating, and taking narcotics on the street. Six hundred jurisdictions around America refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement; one judge even allowed a deportee to escape through a back door of the courthouse before ICE arrived. Twenty-one blue state attorneys general are suing to prevent the federal government from finding the identities of illegal immigrants who were given commercial drivers licenses to drive 18-wheelers despite neither knowing English nor having passed a driving test.

Even violence has its supporters. Luigi Mangione ambushed and fatally shot United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson in the back and became a folk hero, with hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed for his defense. Three attempts have been made to assassinate President Trump, and conservative activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down at a college speaking event, with many leftists rejoicing. And remember the riots following the death of George Floyd in a struggle with police that left 35 dead, 1,500 police injured, billions of dollars in property damage, and even an attempt to firebomb a landmark Washington church. The result: few rioters were arrested, even fewer were convicted and received a slap on the wrist, and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris called for the uprising to continue through Election Day.

Last but not least is the war on children. Schools show pornographic videos to kindergarteners. Unscrupulous health professionals and ideologically warped teachers push emotionally disturbed children into gender dysphoria, the belief that they are really the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body, and act as enablers, persuading them to change their clothing and names at school without their parents’ knowledge. California has even banned teachers from notifying parents of the change, which can lead to hormone treatments and surgical mutilation—and, if parents do find out, they are pressured by being asked whether they would rather have a transgender child or a dead child by suicide. Transgendering then leads to “trans women” athletes competing against and sharing locker rooms with biological women. In Washington state, a female wrestler was sexually assaulted during a match by a competitor who, unknown to her, was biologically a male. Yet another outrage is that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a man can’t be charged for possession of AI-generated child pornography as long as it doesn’t depict real children.

How did we get into this mess? As the quotation above from John Adams implies, Jewish and Christian commentators from Dennis Prager to Victor Davis Hanson ascribe the deterioration of societal mores to the decline of religion. Once morality is reduced from God-given commandments to a matter of personal choice, we end up with a situation that has been described as “everyone has his own Shulchan Aruch.”

We need another Great Awakening like the one in the late seventeenth century to return to the right path. America has organizations that can lead the charge. We just need to listen to them.

Societies are defined not by what they preach, but by what they tolerate.

For most of my life, I took the stability of our civil society for granted, as I think most Americans did, unaware that our entire system was held up by an unwritten social law: a nation and every one of its institutions and communities are ultimately defined not by what they preach, but by what they and their leaders tolerate—because whatever is tolerated is eventually normalized.

Until recently, the most non-negotiable boundary of that law was absolute: the open cheerleading of political violence and eliminationist hate was strictly barred from polite society. But when public revelry erupted after October 7, and again in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, with limited institutional backlash, it became brutally clear that our leaders have abandoned this guardrail. By responding with passive, post-facto platitudes against violence while ignoring constituents who actively cheer it on, they allow the unthinkable to become routine, and our social fabric to disintegrate in the process.

Though we first experienced the shock of this reality on October 8, 2023, for me the realization only crystallized in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Across social platforms and campuses, a vocal contingent of young Americans openly celebrated his death. Hundreds of public instances were documented almost instantly, echoing the revelry following Hamas’ atrocities and the lionization of Luigi Mangione after the killing of Brian Thompson. And while some individuals faced swift professional consequences—proving that civil society still knows where to draw the line when sufficient social pressure is applied—the broader, more corrosive dynamic remained unaddressed.

This failure was on full display when, hours after the shooting, Senator Bernie Sanders released a video declaring that “political violence is not the answer and must be condemned.” I was struck to see so many figures across the political spectrum praising his message, when all I heard was a passive truism that cost him nothing. Real moral leadership requires establishing a forward-looking behavioral boundary: “Anyone who endorses, stokes, or cheerleads political violence crosses a line that will not be tolerated in polite society or within our movement.” Sanders failed to confront the radical elements in his own orbit who had spent months pushing stochastic threats and were actively cheering the assassination.

If an institution tolerates the daily endorsement of violence and extreme bigotry, a generic press release issued after blood is spilled—no matter how heartfelt—will never deter extremists. Words spoken after the act, condemning only the act, do not dismantle the permission structure built before it. You cannot circle the wagons around everyone except the lone gunman while shielding those who explicitly enable him. Adhering to universal moral guardrails that unequivocally oppose political violence and eliminationist hate must be the price of admission to public life, and the non-negotiable condition for ongoing membership in any institution or community that wishes to remain part of polite society.

In our hyper-partisan era, political violence is not a failure exclusive to one side of the aisle. Threats originating from the right and the left must be unequivocally rejected. But as Noah Rothman details in Blood in Progress, American history reflects a recurring pattern where left-wing violence—and the rhetorical environment that nurtures it—is more systematically sanitized by left-leaning media and institutions. Dehumanizing rhetoric establishes the baseline conditions; then, when an attack occurs, hyper-partisan logic reframes murder as understandable radicalization, preemptive self-defense, or the isolated action of an unhinged lone wolf.

More frighteningly, this pipeline is being sanitized directly into mainstream politics today. In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, candidate Abdul El-Sayed actively campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a streamer with millions of followers who has repeatedly engaged in violent rhetoric, downplayed the atrocities of October 7, and praised terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. When party leaders refuse to draw a hard line, the establishment shields the candidate, the candidate buffers the extremist, and the cheerleading of violence is laundered into the mainstream. When party figures who had previously criticized El-Sayed’s appearances with Piker fell in line after his primary victory, they completed that laundering process, treating the accommodation of eliminationist rhetoric as a minor compromise.

This marks a dangerous retreat from standards forged during the civil rights era, when American society established that explicit bigotry was socially unacceptable. That collapse became undeniable after October 7, 2023, when open celebrations of mass murder and terror spread unchecked across elite university campuses. Hatred directed at the Jewish community is rarely self-contained; historically, it is the leading indicator that civil guardrails are breaking down, lowering the threshold for political violence across the board.

Drawing these boundaries was once considered a baseline duty of leadership. When William F. Buckley, Jr. systematically excommunicated the John Birch Society from National Review in the 1960s, or when Bill Clinton delivered his “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, they recognized that cheerleaders of hate-inspired lawlessness destroy a coalition’s credibility from within. Historically, it was precisely this cross-ideological consensus—backed by the threat of total social and political ostracization—that broke the power of the Third Klan and drove explicit bigotry to the margins of American life.

Re-establishing these boundaries is not a call for government censorship, but for self-policing cultural standards. Those standards have no teeth when leaders substitute hollow calls for peace in place of the hard work of imposing real social ostracism on those who lay the rhetorical groundwork for violence.

Crucially, taboo enforcement must not devolve into a punitive cancel culture driven by subjective interpretations of intent. It requires assessing a person’s full history and their reaction when confronted. That is why taboo enforcement must maintain an “open door” principle: the goal of a social taboo is accountability, not permanent exile. Those who engage in or sanitize explicit calls for violence must face immediate consequences, but they must also have a clear path back to polite society if they genuinely disavow the rhetoric, apologize, and execute public repair. This concept of teshuvah—repentance and rehabilitation—is essential. We have seen former Klan members, jihadists, and political extremists break out of radical movements and become our most credible advocates for deradicalization, earning their way back to honorable roles in public life.

These guardrails must be applied universally, beginning with our own tribes. Without the discipline of in-group self-critique, taboo enforcement collapses into partisan deflection. When left-leaning figures were criticized for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, the immediate instinct was to point across the aisle to right-wing extremism. But retaliatory deflection only accelerates normalization. The only principled response must be: “This celebration of violence is unacceptable in our movement, or anywhere in polite society.”

While the current climate feels bleak, there is reason for optimism. Although surveys show an uptick in young people expressing tolerance for political violence, these views remain confined to a fringe. The vast majority of Americans abhor violence and the eliminationist hate that inspires it, even if some find excuses to defend it. Our media ecosystem and polarized academic environments distort our perception, convincing us that our neighbors are mortal enemies. But that perception is a collective illusion that doesn’t reflect reality. By holding our own political and tribal allies and leaders accountable and refusing to excuse those who sanitize eliminationist hate, we can maintain the baseline decency that keeps civil society intact.

A case study in shibboleths

A shibboleth, ironically, has its roots in Judeo-Christian scripture. In the Book of Judges, it was a password at a river crossing—the men of Gilead asked travelers to say “shibboleth,” and their enemies from Ephraim, unable to pronounce the “sh” sound, said “sibboleth” instead. The mispronunciation gave them away. In modern usage, a shibboleth doesn’t have to be a mispronounced word—it can be any word, phrase, or fundamental that reveals more than the speaker intends: an agenda hiding inside a slogan.

You’ve heard the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Almost no one asks the question that, to me, functions as a shibboleth: why does it rhyme in English?

The underlying geographic claim (min il-mayye la-l-mayye), “From the water to the water”—is old, entering use through the PLO in the 1960s, long before English-speaking campus crowds ever chanted it. But the last four words and the version that spread through London, Washington, and Rome, especially after October 2023, is a specifically English-language construction. Translate it into French or German and the geography survives, but the music doesn’t—the “sea/free” rhyme that makes it chantable, shareable, and memorable is an artifact of English phonetics, built for an audience that doesn’t speak Arabic and has never heard the original.

And “free” is doing more work in English than a simple translation would suggest. I put the question directly to Khaled Abu Toameh—the veteran Israeli Arab Muslim (and technically Palestinian though he doesn’t subscribe to the moniker) journalist who has covered Palestinian affairs for nearly four decades, formerly of NBC News and The Jerusalem Post—during a recent trip to the region. His answer was direct: “That is not what they are saying. They are saying: from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim (and in some cases: ‘…will be Arab’).” In Arabic, that formulation is “من النهر إلى البحر، فلسطين ستكون إسلامية”—“from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Islamic”—or, in the other version Toameh referenced, “فلسطين ستكون عربية,” meaning “Palestine will be Arab.” 

This is supported by the fact that terrorist and other attacks are not just killing Jews but are targeting other non-Muslims in the region. The attacks on October 7 (and attacks before, and since) included the Druze, who came out of Shia Islam but do not identify as Muslim. Bedouins (Sunni Muslims) were also killed in the October 7 attacks.

That substitution matters enormously. “Free” is a word with singular, sacred weight in the Western political imagination—it summons the American Revolution, civil rights, every liberation movement about which the West has ever told itself a righteous story. It’s a word Western crowds are primed to chant without asking a single follow-up question. “Muslim” is a different claim entirely—not a claim about liberty, but about religious governance over the land in question. Swap one word for the other and the chant stops being a plea for freedom and becomes a statement of intent. That distinction is exactly what a Western audience, chanting a rhyme in a language they don’t speak, has no way to catch. We have to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question: Who is that for? Who is that version of the chant created for?

That’s the shibboleth. Not that the underlying geography is fabricated—it isn’t. But that the version doing the work on Western streets and Western campuses was built for people who can’t check it against the original. Ask the marcher what the phrase means in the language in which it was born, and most can’t tell you. They know the rhyme. They don’t know the referent.

And the referent matters, because it isn’t really about “freedom” in the sense a Western listener hears that word. There are three separate conflicts being flattened into one chant: a religious war over sacred land, a political war over sovereignty and governance, and a territorial war over borders. Collapsing all three into a four-word rhyme is exactly what makes the chant effective as propaganda—it lets the listener supply their own meaning while the speaker’s actual claim goes untranslated and unexamined. Which is the point, and exactly how propaganda works.

It’s also worth knowing that this geography has been claimed by more than one side. Likud’s own 1977 political platform used the mirror-image formulation in Hebrew—“between the sea and the Jordan”—to stake its own claim to the same land, under a different political project entirely. The shape of the phrase isn’t unique to one ideology. What’s unique is which version gets a rhyme, a hashtag, and a crowd of people who’ve never set foot in Gaza or the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), chanting it on a Saturday afternoon in a language its original authors didn’t speak.

There’s a deeper irony underneath all of this: the word “Palestine” itself long predates any Palestinian political movement, and its history is not what most people assume. The name traces to the Philistines, an ancient people who occupied a small stretch of the coast and vanished as a distinct group over a thousand years before the current conflict began. Herodotus used a version of the name in the 5th century B.C.E., but it became politically significant in 135 C.E., when the Roman emperor Hadrian, having just crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt, deliberately renamed the province of Judea “Syria-Palaestina”—using the name of a historically hostile people as an act of erasure, to sever the land’s name from its Jewish identity. That renamed designation is the one on top of which Yasser Arafat and the PLO later built a modern political movement, formalizing it in the 1960s into the singular national and religious identity it’s now presumed to be.

But “Palestinian” was never, historically, a religious or ethnic category—it’s a political one, and a recent one. Druze, Bedouins, and Israeli Muslim Arabs live in the same land, share ancestry and, in many cases, language with those who identify as Palestinian—and many of them are loyal citizens of Israel, not participants in the Palestinian national project at all. The chant, the flag, the movement: all of it rests on a 20th century political identity, built on a name a Roman emperor chose to erase the Jewish people from their own land, now presented to Western audiences as ancient, singular, and beyond question.

“West Bank” is itself a case study in the same phenomenon. The name didn’t exist before 1950. It was coined by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan after its army occupied the territory during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—an annexation recognized by exactly two governments in the entire world, Britain and Pakistan, and rejected by everyone else, including every Arab state. Jordan’s name for the land wasn’t descriptive of the land itself; it was descriptive of the land’s position relative to Amman—the west bank of the Jordan River, as opposed to Jordan’s own east bank. 

In Israel, “Judea and Samaria” is not some fringe political label for the same territory. It is standard terminology, including in official usage, and the Knesset has moved in recent years to replace “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria.” 

The region had carried other names for thousands of years before that: Judea, after the Kingdom of Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem; Samaria, after the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Josephus wrote about Judea and Samaria in the first century. The Mishnah legislated for them in the second. Byzantine administrators governed them under those names in the fifth. Even the British Mandate’s own 1937 and 1947 partition plans, and the U.N.’s 1947 Partition Resolution, used them. An ancient, continuously attested name was replaced, less than eighty years ago, by a term that only makes sense if you’re standing in Amman—and almost no one saying “West Bank” today knows that’s the vantage point they’ve inherited. 

Calling ancient Jerusalem’s highlands (which would be more accurately described as East Jerusalem) the “West Bank” would be like calling the entire Hudson Valley “New Jersey’s East Side” and Hoboken the “West Bank” of Manhattan.

None of this requires being anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, or anti-Palestinian to notice. It requires noticing that a slogan built for you, in your language, engineered for your ear, is doing something different than informing you. It’s recruiting you—to a side of a binary that doesn’t actually exist, in a conflict far more complicated than four words can hold.

Dolly Parton died this week at the age of 80, and in the flood of tributes that followed, people quite rightly talked about the songs, the movies, the outrageous wigs, the one-liners, the philanthropy, and the extraordinary ability she had to make almost everyone feel as though she somehow belonged to them. Republicans loved Dolly. Democrats loved Dolly. People who could barely make it through Thanksgiving dinner together without arguing about politics could happily spend an evening listening to the same Dolly Parton songs. There are plenty of reasons for that, including the obvious one that she was enormously talented, but I think there was something else at work as well. Dolly understood something that we seem to be forgetting: not everything has to become politics, and refusing to turn everything into politics is not necessarily a failure of courage. Sometimes silence is just silence.

She said it plainly throughout her career. “I don’t do politics.” “I’m not in politics, I’m an entertainer.” She had fans on both sides of the political fence and had no particular interest in telling half of them that they were lesser people because they stood on the wrong side of it. She even declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom when it was offered by Donald Trump and later by Joe Biden, in part because accepting it from one after declining it from the other could be interpreted as choosing a political side. When a comment about someday seeing a woman in the White House was turned into a Hillary Clinton endorsement, Dolly corrected the record. She had endorsed neither Clinton nor Trump and, at the time, said she had not even decided how she would vote. She also talked about what politics had done to family dinners and ordinary relationships, particularly the increasingly common idea that once you belonged to a political party you were expected to accept an entire package of opinions along with it. She wanted no part of that.

None of this meant Dolly Parton had no convictions. A person does not give millions of books to children because she believes in nothing. She spent much of her life talking about kindness, dignity, generosity, hard work, faith, tolerance, and treating people decently, and then she spent a good portion of the money she earned actually doing those things. Her Imagination Library alone put hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children, and her philanthropy extended from education to disaster relief and medical research. What Dolly resisted was the increasingly fashionable idea that values count only after they have been translated into partisan positions and announced publicly. She did not turn kindness into a political sorting machine. She did not ask how someone voted before deciding whether that person deserved compassion, and she did not seem to believe disagreement was evidence of defective character. That may sound like a modest thing, but at this particular moment in American life, it feels almost radical.

We received a useful reminder of just how radical only a few weeks ago. Dwayne Johnson, who had publicly endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, later said he regretted making that endorsement because of the division it created among his audience. Then, in a June 2026 interview with Esquire, he explained that he had decided to keep his politics largely to himself. He wanted to keep, as he put it, “the main thing the main thing,” and for him the main thing was creating, art, and storytelling. Politics was already everywhere, he said, and he hated much of the slinging that came with it. That seems to me a perfectly defensible decision for an entertainer, particularly one who has already discovered that a political endorsement can instantly divide an audience that had previously shared something in common.

George Takei did not see it that way. Responding to Johnson, Takei wrote, “Silence is complicity.” Wil Wheaton then replied that it was disappointing to discover Johnson was “such a coward.” What struck me about that exchange was that Johnson was not being condemned for expressing some terrible political opinion. He was being condemned for refusing to express one. He had not endorsed the wrong candidate, defended the wrong policy, or attacked anyone. His offense was declining to participate. Under that standard, neutrality itself becomes suspect. Privacy becomes evidence. Silence is transformed from the absence of a statement into a statement that someone else is entitled to interpret for you.

“Silence is complicity” is one of those phrases that sounds self-evidently moral until we ask what it actually means and where it leads. There are certainly circumstances in which silence can make someone complicit. If I witness someone being abused and have the ability to help, my silence matters. If I know a crime has been committed and deliberately conceal it, silence may become participation. History offers horrifying examples of people who watched genuine evil unfold and chose safety over conscience. In those circumstances, “silence is complicity” can express an important moral truth. But that is very different from saying that a private citizen, actor, singer, athlete, writer, or neighbor is morally obligated to make a public political declaration whenever somebody else decides that an issue is important enough. The first proposition concerns knowingly allowing or assisting wrongdoing. The second concerns compelling another person to speak.

That distinction matters, particularly to anyone who still believes in the older liberal tradition of freedom of conscience. Liberalism, in its best sense, was never merely the freedom to say approved things. It rested on the idea that individuals possess a private moral space into which neither the government nor the church nor the employer nor the crowd has an automatic right of entry. It defended unpopular speech because popular speech does not need defending. It protected religious belief and disbelief, political dissent, freedom of association and non-association, and the right to reach conclusions that other people considered foolish, offensive, or simply wrong. Just as importantly, it was suspicious of loyalty oaths, ideological tests, compelled declarations, and demands that people publicly demonstrate that they stood on the correct side. Freedom of speech means very little if someone else gets to decide when you are required to exercise it.

That is the danger hidden inside “silence is complicity” when it becomes a general political principle rather than a warning reserved for extraordinary circumstances. If silence itself establishes guilt, almost anything done to force speech can be made to sound virtuous. Pressure becomes accountability. Public humiliation becomes moral courage. Trying to damage someone’s reputation or career because that person refuses to endorse your cause becomes a righteous response to complicity. Calling a man a coward because he wants to make movies instead of issuing political declarations can be presented as standing up for principle. The slogan becomes a remarkably convenient moral permission slip because it allows us to do things we might otherwise recognize as intolerant while continuing to regard ourselves as champions of tolerance. We are not demanding obedience, we tell ourselves. We are demanding courage. We are not punishing someone for refusing to speak. We are holding that person accountable for silence.

That is how bad behavior acquires a halo.

There is another problem with the phrase, and it is a fairly obvious one: complicity with whom? The idea works neatly only when everyone agrees about which causes are righteous, which policies are just, which wars are necessary, which candidates are dangerous, and which side of every political argument history will eventually vindicate. Human beings have demonstrated very little ability to reach that kind of agreement. One faction can demand that an entertainer speak and call silence complicity, while another can hear the resulting statement and declare that the entertainer is now complicit in something else. If silence itself is guilt, every political faction gains the right to summon us to the microphone and demand an answer. There is no principled place left for neutrality, uncertainty, privacy, restraint, or simply saying, “This is mine, and I would rather keep it between myself and the ballot box.” What follows is not moral clarity. It is an endless succession of loyalty tests administered by whoever happens to hold the microphone.

And if that really is the standard, then we ought to have the courage to apply it consistently. Dolly Parton spent roughly sixty years refusing those tests. She avoided partisan endorsements, deflected political questions, and continued welcoming an audience filled with people who undoubtedly disagreed about presidents, wars, taxes, abortion, guns, religion, race, immigration, and most of the other subjects Americans have found reasons to fight about. If “silence is complicity” is an absolute moral rule, then Dolly was complicit. If refusing to publicly announce your politics makes you a coward, then Dolly Parton was a coward for most of her adult life.

Almost nobody mourning her this week believes that.

And perhaps that should cause us to reconsider the rule rather than invent an exception for Dolly.

Her life demonstrated that there is an enormous difference between refusing to care and refusing to perform one’s politics in public. Dolly cared, often on a scale most of us will never approach. She gave money, created opportunities, supported literacy, helped communities after disasters, encouraged young artists, and treated people with a generosity that became almost as much a part of her public identity as her music. She simply did not believe she had to attach a party label to that compassion for it to count. Nor did she seem to think that before she could love people she first needed to know whether they had voted correctly.

Maybe that is one of the quieter things worth remembering about Dolly Parton now. The songs will survive. So will the rhinestones, the jokes, Dollywood, the movies, and all those books placed into the hands of children. But I hope something of her instinct for leaving room around other people survives too. She seemed to understand that we do not have to know everything another person believes before deciding whether we can share a song, a laugh, a meal, a neighborhood, or a country with them. She understood that conviction does not require constant declaration and that tolerance means considerably more than being gracious toward people who already agree with us. Above all, she seemed to understand that another person’s conscience does not belong to us.

There are times when silence really is cowardice. There are times when silence assists evil, and there are moments in history when decent people have a responsibility to stand up and be counted. A liberal society has to leave room for that moral judgment. But it also has to leave room for the individual to make that judgment for himself or herself. The right to speak must include the right to remain silent, just as freedom of religion includes the freedom not to believe and freedom of association includes the freedom not to join. Otherwise, these are not freedoms at all. They are obligations disguised as rights.

Dolly Parton never made a great political speech explaining any of this. In a way, that would have defeated the point. She simply spent a lifetime showing that it was possible to care deeply about people without first sorting them into political camps, and to live according to strong convictions without demanding a confession of faith from everyone else.

Sometimes silence is complicity.

And sometimes silence is just silence.

That distinction seems especially appropriate for White Rose Magazine. The original White Rose found the courage to speak when confronted with the very real evil of the Nazi regime; our responsibility, in that same spirit of conscience and true liberalism, is not to declare every silence guilty, but to discern the difference between the moments that demand a voice and those in which another person’s silence deserves to remain his or her own.

Knowing the difference may be one of the most liberal things we can do.

What happens when a painting stolen from a Jewish family during the Holocaust resurfaces eighty years later and a descendant discovers it?

At first, the answer might seem straightforward: the painting should go home.

Adena J. Bernstein’s Stolen Legacies: The Fight for Nazi-Looted Art shows why it is rarely so simple. More importantly, she demonstrates why the fight over Nazi-looted art cannot be understood simply as a question of who owns a painting. It is a question about law and justice, historical truth and memory, property and human loss. Bernstein’s achievement is to bring these questions together without pretending that they can always be resolved in the same way.

I found the book both deeply disturbing and deeply moving. It is disturbing because injustice can remain unresolved even when the historical record is clear. It is moving because Bernstein never allows the paintings to become merely evidence of loss. Instead, they remain connected to people, families, memory, and the persistence of human creativity.

Bernstein, a career prosecutor and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, approaches the subject with both legal knowledge and personal understanding. She follows the complicated histories of artworks taken from Jewish families during the Holocaust, tracing how paintings could move through dealers, collectors, museums, and governments and acquire layers of ownership that increasingly separated them from the people from whom they had been taken.

Her approach makes the subject remarkably engaging. The cases have the momentum of legal mysteries: Who owned the work? How was it taken? What happened to it afterward? Who possesses it now? And what would justice require?

But Bernstein’s larger achievement is the way she moves the reader from asking what happened to asking how we should understand what happened.

The history of Nazi persecution is horrific enough on its own. Yet the problem of Nazi-looted art did not end when the war ended. Survivors and their descendants could spend decades trying to discover what had happened to family possessions. Records were destroyed or scattered. Families were murdered or displaced. Provenance, the documented history of an artwork’s ownership, could be incomplete, deliberately obscured, or simply lost with the people who had known the truth.

This creates one of the book’s most painful tensions: the truth may be recoverable even when justice remains difficult to achieve.

Restitution cases must often proceed through legal systems concerned with statutes of limitation, burdens of proof, jurisdiction, good-faith purchasers, and competing claims. These are legitimate legal questions, but they can seem painfully inadequate when the original loss occurred under conditions of persecution and terror.

How do you ask a family fleeing for its life to preserve the documentation that will be needed eighty years later?

How do you prove ownership when the people who could have established that ownership were murdered?

Bernstein makes these questions concrete through the cases she examines. One of the book’s most powerful examples is the long fight over Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, sought for decades by Maria Altmann and the other heirs of her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Altmann’s effort to recover the painting from Austria eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, turning a family’s decades-old claim into a landmark restitution case.

The case reveals how profoundly the meaning of a work can change when its history is rediscovered decades after its seizure. By the time the case was resolved, the world in which Adele and her family had lived had been destroyed. The question was no longer simply where the painting belonged, but how the law could recognize an injustice that had begun long before the people who suffered it were gone.

A museum may possess an artwork today without having stolen it. A collector may have purchased it in good faith, and a dealer may have handled it as part of what appeared to be a legitimate transaction. Yet at the beginning of that chain may be a Jewish family whose property was taken because of persecution.

Bernstein makes clear that these questions cannot simply be collapsed into one another. Her cases have encouraged me to think further about the gap between moral responsibility and the legal mechanisms through which restitution is pursued.

One of the ideas that stayed with me while reading Stolen Legacies is that there can be a second, quieter theft: the loss of the story itself.

When a painting is separated from the family that owned it, something about that family can disappear from the historical record as well. The artwork survives, but the people connected to it may not.

Bernstein’s book therefore raises a question larger than ownership: what remains of people after catastrophe, and what can the objects they leave behind preserve when they are gone?

The painting becomes more than property.

It becomes evidence that those people lived.

This is one of the reasons Bernstein’s argument is so compelling. She asks us to look beyond the monetary and legal value of an artwork toward the human meaning it carries. A painting can be property and evidence, but it can also be memory, one of the last surviving links to people who are gone.

The question, therefore, is not only who owns the painting, but what history the painting carries.

The book is also remarkably engaging because it makes a complicated subject accessible without making it simplistic. Readers who know little about provenance or restitution can follow the cases and understand why apparently straightforward claims can become extraordinarily difficult. At the same time, Bernstein encourages readers to think beyond the legal vocabulary itself.

This is where Bernstein’s central point becomes most persuasive. Nazi-looted art cannot be understood solely as a problem of ownership. Restitution sits at the intersection of law, historical truth, memory, and irreparable human loss. These categories overlap, but they do not always lead to the same conclusion.

Returning a painting can recognize an original owner’s claim and correct an injustice. But it cannot restore the people who were murdered. It cannot recreate the home from which the painting was taken or reconstruct the world that existed before the Holocaust.

That does not make restitution meaningless. It makes its meaning more complicated, and, in some ways, more important.

Yet Bernstein does not leave the reader with that impossibility alone. She ultimately brings us back to the meaning of art itself: to the fact that art begins with human beings creating something that can outlast them.

The Nazis sought not only to strip Jewish families of their possessions but to destroy people, communities, identities, and cultural worlds.

Art cannot undo that destruction. It cannot restore those who were murdered.

But creation continues. Culture continues. Human beings continue to make meaning.

The paintings are still here.

The people who owned many of them are not.

But their names can be recovered. Their histories can be reconstructed. Their stories can be told again.

This is what makes Stolen Legacies more than a study of disputed artworks. Bernstein shows that the fight over Nazi-looted art is also a struggle against historical disappearance. Recovering the history attached to an artwork cannot restore the world that was destroyed, but it can prevent the people connected to that artwork from disappearing from memory altogether.

I finished Stolen Legacies deeply disturbed by how much injustice can survive even after the truth has been established, but also deeply moved by Bernstein’s insistence that destruction does not have to be the final word.

What was stolen cannot always be returned.

What was destroyed cannot be restored.

But what was nearly erased can still be remembered.

Sometimes, through art, the past finds its way back into the present.

Dear Mr. Vice President,

I wrote you an open letter in July out of concern about the direction you were taking on Israel. I strongly disagreed with you, but I assumed you were acting within what you considered to be good faith. I thought you were getting pulled into a political movement that was becoming increasingly hostile to Israel, and that perhaps you did not fully appreciate from where some of the arguments you were repeating came.

I no longer believe that.

You do make some good points. Israel is a sovereign nation, and its interests are not always the same as ours. No American leader has an obligation to support every decision made by Benjamin Netanyahu, and no American should be called anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel where interests or opinions differ. I have criticized Israeli policies myself and will do so again when I believe Israel is wrong.

What concerns me is the pattern around your criticisms. You have remained close to Tucker Carlson, as Carlson has moved further into a world some would have called the “alt-right” in 2017, but that has moved even further. Frankly, I think getting fired from Fox News broke something in him and he has flushed his integrity down the toilet to try and regain his former fame.

You have become increasingly obsessed with conspiracy theories that portray Israel as guilty of nefarious things. People around you increasingly respond to your critics by accusing them of being paid Israeli shills. At the same time, your economic philosophy has scorned free markets and turns toward government-directed outcomes, while your Catholic “post-liberalism” rejects important parts of the classical liberal tradition on which our constitutional system depends—the constitutional prevention of government from enforcing the supremacy of one religious faction most of all.

In short, you are a threat to our nation, and to our way of life.

Although you have not yet announced it, you are running for president in 2028 and are positioning yourself to inherit Donald Trump’s movement. 

Tucker Carlson influences part of that audience, including a growing fringe selling itself as “conservative” that has become openly hostile not only to Israel, but also to Jews as people. Carlson has normalized people like Nick Fuentes, and ideas such as that Christians who support Israel have a “brain virus.”

You are not stupid, Mr. Vice President. You are, in fact, one of the most intelligent people in American politics. You know exactly what Tucker Carlson is doing, and you know exactly who is gathering around him, yet you refuse to draw a line.

Perhaps that is because you agree with Carlson. If so, have the courage to say it. Perhaps you think Carlson has gone too far but you are afraid to alienate his audience (whose ratio of actual Americans to Third World foreigners and bots, just like Fuentes’ own, is debatable to say the least) before 2028. If that is true, have the courage you displayed in Iraq and admit it.

Instead, you stay close enough to Carlson to keep his audience while leaving just enough distance between yourself and his worst arguments to deny responsibility for them. You might also keep in mind that his actual audience might not be as big as he claims.

That is not leadership, or at least it is not the kind of leadership the conservative movement needs.

Your growing obsession with conspiracy theories involving Israel makes this even harder to dismiss. You told Joe Rogan that Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.” You also acknowledged that there is no evidence that Epstein worked for the Mossad, the CIA, or any other intelligence service. 

Sir, it was our FBI that left Epstein’s blackmail material in an unlocked safe for four days while getting a subpoena to remove it. The FBI has judges on speed-dial for those kinds of situations and could have had a warrant almost immediately. The FBI could also have left a guard. Instead, it left the safe open and those materials vanished. It wasn’t the Mossad that did that, and it wasn’t any other part of Israel. It was our FBI, so if that points to an intelligence service, it points to ours. 

As vice president you are privy to the kinds of classified materials that would tell you exactly who the FBI allowed to take those materials. You don’t have evidence to support your claim because you know your claim is not true, and yet you made it anyway.

Shame on you, sir.

Increasingly, whenever Israel is involved, and, sometimes, even when it is not, you begin with suspicion and then go looking for evidence. Israel becomes the hidden hand. The Mossad becomes the explanation, and Israeli influence becomes the story behind the story. Facts that would be considered hopelessly inadequate in almost any other context suddenly become enough to entertain sweeping claims, as soon as Israel is involved.

Then came the Israeli influence campaign surrounding the Memorandum of Understanding. Israel reportedly funded an American campaign designed to influence American opinion—an idea given to them by your late friend, Charlie Kirk. 

Foreign governments try to influence American politics all the time and there is nothing wrong with that unless they use illicit means or spread information that is not true.

Do you know what is true? The Islamic regime occupying Iran was about a week away from having the materials to build 11 nuclear bombs. I keep hearing that our intelligence has been wrong about the regime’s nuclear progress for 40 years, but my source for that is not our intelligence. It is Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who negotiated for the Islamic government before the war started. Araghchi thought he was making the case that we should give up on stopping them from getting the bomb, but it made the case that we should give up on the negotiations.

Since you want to be Commander-in-Chief, let me ask you something: do you prefer dealing with this regime before a jihadist in a minivan takes out a major U.S. city, or after?

I grew up during the Cold War. I remember hearing as a child that it takes a half hour for a Soviet ICBM to hit the United States, and I remember thinking about what I would do with that half hour. Imagine a six-year-old or a 12-year-old wondering what he would do if he only had half an hour before the world ends. 

We are fighting the Islamic regime to make sure my children and your children never have to ask themselves a question like that.

As Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in a 2001 sermon at Tehran University, “The employment of even one atomic bomb inside Israel will wipe it off the face of the earth, but [such a bomb] would only do damage to the Islamic World.” He then said, “it is not unreasonable to consider this possibility.”

“Death to America” is an official slogan of the Islamic Republic—a “policy,” in fact, as the former “Supreme Leader” your boss helped kill described it in 2023. If one nuclear weapon is enough to take out Israel, for what do you think the Islamic regime wants the other 10? And that’s assuming it would have stopped at 11. The regime has plenty of targets in the United States, and has all of Europe if it runs out. It wants to hit us; but it also wants plausible deniability when it does.

You are a bit younger than me and might not remember this, but the Islamic Republic had children roll across minefields to blow up mines during the Iran-Iraq War, ahead of its army. It had those children wrap up in rugs first to help hold their bodies intact, so they could be buried. More recently, it killed an estimated 50,000 (at least) of its own protestors. Given that this is how the Islamic regime treats its own people, how do you think it would treat us if it had the means to kill us?

Let me be clear: if Benjamin Netanyahu really did have to talk Trump into this war, that would reflect negatively on President Trump. It was our negotiators who found out how close the regime was to having nukes, so it should have been us talking Israel into bombing Iran—which is what Trump openly and clearly said a few days later. This is our war and it needs to be fought no matter how unpopular it may be. That is what real leaders do: they lead.

“America first” does not mean America only, and if you can’t see that, I’m sorry, but you are unfit to serve.

People who defend Israel are increasingly accused by those around you of being paid by Israel. People who criticize you are accused of being paid Israeli shills. Tomi Lahren has seen this personally. 

If Israel is paying someone, show me the money. I’m certainly not getting paid, but nor do I need to be. I support Israel because I believe supporting Israel is in America’s interests. I also believe Israel represents something worth defending in a region dominated by governments that share neither our values nor our interests. The question is not why I support Israel, but why you do not.

Your political calculation is obvious. The Republican Party after Trump will need someone capable of holding its different factions together. Marco Rubio can appeal to traditional conservatives and the pro-Israel wing of the party. You can appeal to the populist wing. More importantly, you can become the Republican candidate Tucker Carlson is willing to support.

Allow me to go a step further.

I don’t think you are anti-Semitic, and I don’t think you hate Israel. I think you are an extremely intelligent man whose ambitions exceed his morals, and I think you want to position yourself as close to Marco Rubio as possible, to get the alt-right’s support. 

The alt-right is not a conservative movement though, nor a part of the actual right. The phrase means “alternative to the right,” and it stands as a group of people that believe everything the left does about identity politics, white supremacy, and everything else. I hope courting that vote costs you the primary, and you can call me an Israeli shill from now to the 2028 election. It will not make the fact that you are courting those who call Hitler “cool,” who call Stalin a “great man,” or who compared incinerating Jewish bodies to baking cookies, go away. You are courting that vote (people who tend to complain online far more than vote, by the way), and I intend to make you own it.

You aren’t even really a conservative. Your economics are not free-market. You support tariffs, stronger unions, and an aggressive government role in shaping markets. You have embraced over-zealous anti-trust enforcement and have repeatedly shown that you are comfortable using state power to produce economic outcomes you consider desirable.

Some of your criticism is valid. Markets are not perfect. China does not practice free trade, and pretending that unilateral free trade with a mercantilist adversary is somehow principled conservatism is ridiculous. Corporations can become powerful enough to distort markets and government alike. I agree with you on more of that than you probably think. The problem is that once the government takes responsibility for producing the “right” economic outcome, someone has to define what that means. I don’t trust you to do that. I don’t even trust you to protect my children from the IRGC’s nuclear weapons.

We’re both Marines. We are also both Christians, but your Catholic “post-liberalism” is a problem. You are a brother in Christ, but the post-liberal political philosophy with which you have associated yourself rejects important parts of the classical liberal tradition, including individual liberty, limited government, and religious freedom.

Patrick Deneen, whose work you have praised, called for an American “regime change.” Post-liberals believe that government should promote their conception of the “common good.” Some are willing to aggressively use bureaucratic power once their side controls the bureaucracy.

I understand why that appeals to those who watched the left capture our institutions, but the answer to progressive authoritarianism is not conservative authoritarianism. It is to un-capture the institutions entirely, and to put in safeguards, such as a return to the Tenth Amendment, to ensure that they are never captured again.

That is why limited government and free markets matter. Those principles are not inconveniences that prevent good leaders from doing good things. They are safeguards that prevent bad leaders from doing terrible things, which leaves me wondering what exactly you think conservatism is supposed to conserve.

You also subtly insult American Protestants as materialistic heretics in your new book—and I don’t think a party whose voting base has been evangelical Protestants for nearly 50 years at least will vote for a man who proudly condemns the Reformation itself. Millions of Christians died in wars inspired by religious hatred between 1522 and 1714; not one, by the grace of God, was an American, and we would like to keep it that way.

Your economics reject important parts of free-market conservatism. Your post-liberalism rejects important parts of classical liberalism. Your foreign policy increasingly treats one of America’s closest allies as a source of hidden manipulation. Your political coalition increasingly tolerates people who question the loyalty of American Jews and anyone else who supports Israel, and your closest media ally keeps moving further into the alt-right, while you find reason after reason not to draw a line.

I spent eight years in uniform, first in the Marine Corps and later in the Army. I do not use the title Marine casually, and though I do not like to question another Marine’s honor, I am questioning yours.

A Marine does not sell his integrity for a promotion, and I think that is exactly what you have done. You have decided that drawing a line costs more than remaining silent. That is a political calculation, and it may even be a good one, but it should be beneath you.

I once saw you as a man who entered politics because he believed something and was willing to lose something for it. Now I see another politician calculating his next move.

Luckily, I see other Republicans as well, and my guess is that Marco Rubio decides to run, not just to protect us from the political left, but increasingly to protect us from you. I’ll be sending him a copy of this letter.

If Rubio runs, he has my vote. I urge him to do so, and though the last time I wrote you I closed with “Semper fi,” I think I’ll save that for him. Rubio may not be a Marine, but he is far more worthy than you.

Sincerely yours,

Wallace L. Garneau

Dear J. D.,

I’d say “Mr. Vice President,” but I respect you the same way you respect the intelligence of the American people. You see, I despise liars. And since becoming vice president, all you have done is lie and obfuscate issue after issue.

When you tried to pass the Iranian Memorandum of Understanding off as a “peace deal” with Iran, everyone with an iota of knowledge about the regime in Iran should have tossed you aside as a gullible, naïve fool. Peace. With Iran. A “peace plan.” A “peace deal.” With Iran. Those are your words.

How is that one working out for you? But it wasn’t just the aggressive ignorance you displayed that was so galling—it was the blatant lying. There were 14 points to the MOU, and you lied about no fewer than four of them. Turns out “Iranian propaganda” about the deal was more trustworthy than you are. You lied for days about what was in the MOU. Why? Do you think Americans are stupid? Do you think we’re as gullible as you are?

But that is my main issue with you. You lie. Constantly. It’s not that I don’t trust you—I trust you completely. I trust you the same way I trust the New York Times. Which is to say, I trust you to always either lie or make errors in one direction. And that’s before we get into your suspicious ability to always side with the groypers.

Not to beat a dead horse, but you had some harsh words for Israeli officials when they—rightfully—called you out for trying to make peace with regime in Iran. Strange, then, that I don’t remember a mea culpa coming from you. You claim your faith in Catholicism is strong, so let me put this in words you might understand: “What would Jesus do?”

Pretty certain he wouldn’t lie to Jews the way you did. I don’t think he would claim—like you did at a TPUSA (read: Groyper Academy) event—that Israel is not “controlling this president of the United States.” So Israel controls every other president of the United States? Should I just start calling you Vice President Fuentes? Because I do recall you bypassing the point of that very same questioner when he said the religion of Judaism “openly supports the prosecution [sic] of ours [Christianity].”

I know you heard him. You felt more than capable of answering every other part of his question, and you did so by invoking the anti-Semitic trope that Jews are the puppet masters pulling the strings on world leaders like United States presidents (except for Donald Trump). You and your team refused to condemn that hilariously ahistorical comment. Really? The religion of Judaism persecutes Christianity?

Dare I ask if you’ve read a history book? Want to take that question again and answer truthfully? How many Christian crusades were there again? How many Jews murdered by Christians during their trek to Jerusalem? I know you might not know your history, but at some point we do expect “the Spanish Inquisition” to come from your mouth when answering that question.

And we do know you know how to clap back at Jewish reporters for asking pointed questions about whom you put on your staff. When Buckley Carlson, Tucker Carlson’s son, was part of your communications team, Sloan Rachmuth asked the question many Jews wanted to know: how much of Tucker Carlson’s politics overlap with yours?

Instead of answering the question, you attacked Rachmuth for asking it. Quite a strange take given you have never condemned Tucker Carlson nor his increasingly insane and loathsome attacks on your boss, President Trump. Even in your middle-school response to Rachmuth, you phrased her attack as coming because “she doesn’t like the views of his father.” Question: do you like the views of his father? With every passing day it is getting exceedingly hard to tell whether you even agree with the president’s agenda. Remember, you’re the vice president, not the president.

You do understand the difference, right? You are supposed to be enacting his policies, his agenda. Yet, from where most Americans who pay attention to international politics are standing, you seem to be executing the policies and prescriptions of Tucker Carlson, not Donald Trump.

And we know why. You didn’t earn your office. You were hand-picked for the position despite not earning anything. You didn’t earn your senatorial win. Peter Thiel had to catapult you from the middle of the pack just so you could win the Republican primary. And then, before you did anything of note, Donald Trump—still friends at the time with Tucker Carlson—listened to Tucker Carlson, and now you’re one bad heartbeat away from being the most powerful man in the world.

The online world castigates you as “Hillbilly Obama,” and sorry, but that’s a fairly accurate description of your meteoric rise to power in politics. You’re a post-liberal populist who routinely says that if only you had the power, you would know what to do with it. You are the exact type of person the Founding Fathers warned against, and it scares me to no end that you might be president one day.

Mr. “I love Pakistan.” Really? What is it about Pakistan you love so much? Their love of jihad? That it is chock-full of terrorists? That terrorism is standard operating procedure for them? That they beat their wives and kill their daughters? Can you please explain what about Pakistan you love so much? Maybe it’s that they are a cut-out for the genocidal regime occupying Iram. After all, we still don’t know exactly who leaked the Kurdish option to Turkey, which then compelled Donald Trump to veto the plan to use the Kurds to help topple the regime.

You seem quite friendly with Qatar—maybe the only thing you, Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson all agree upon—so maybe it has something to do with that? I am not sure. But please don’t hate me; I’m just asking questions.

Or maybe it is your love and embracing of Theo Von. Von, who despises the State of Israel, spreads blood libels about it, all while sporting the intelligence and world-savvy analysis of a fifth grader who has never completed a homework assignment. Yet to you, he has a good heart. Does he, though? People who spread lies about Jews and the State of Israel don’t seem to have good hearts in my estimation.

But then again, this is you declaring what is good and bad. You, who admittedly loves himself some conspiracy theories, including those related to Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, Epstein—the lodestone for all conspiracy theories. Hell, even Charlie Kirk blabbed around with Megyn Kelly about how Epstein was a Mossad agent despite a total and utter lack of evidence.

This is not what good people do. But, thankfully, I expect this from you. You never surprise me because—like the New York Times—I always expect the worst from you, and you never disappoint. Peddle anti-Semitic tropes about Israel controlling United States presidents? Yeah, you’ve done that. Lie to the American people on behalf of the Islamic terrorist regimes in Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar? Mmhmm, you’ve done that. Laugh in the face of all recorded history in order for Christians to play the victim to Jews of all people? You made sure to gloss over that accusation and let it stand unopposed. 

You might hate Nick Fuentes; but it might just be because he’s better than you at this game. Get help and do better, Vice President Groyper. In the meantime, I’ll make sure to pray for Donald Trump’s health.

Sincerely,

Jake Donnelly, aka. @RedWhiteBlueJew

I recently listened to Ronald Reagan’s remarkable speech at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

Near the end, Reagan recalled being asked to write a letter for a time capsule; a letter addressed to the people who would open it one hundred years later, in 2076.

As I listened, something dawned on me:

What if I were given the same assignment today?

What would I write in a letter placed in a time capsule in 2026, to be opened one hundred years from now?

And there is an intriguing historical symmetry to this. Reagan gave that speech 50 years ago, on August 19, 1976.

We are almost exactly halfway between his 1976 audience and the people who would have opened his hypothetical time capsule in 2076.

So perhaps this isn’t simply an imitation of Reagan’s idea.

Perhaps it is picking up Reagan’s question at the halfway point… and asking it again. Only this time, the letter is addressed not to 2076.

It is addressed to 2126. To those who open this letter one hundred years from today: You know everything about us.

We know nothing about you.

You know who won our elections. You know how our wars ended. You know which nations survived, which disappeared, and which rose to take their place.

You know whether the technologies that astonish us today ultimately liberated mankind… or diminished it.

You know whether artificial intelligence became one of humanity’s greatest tools, or whether we surrendered too much of our judgment, our creativity, and perhaps even our humanity to the machines we created.

You know whether we cured diseases that have haunted mankind for centuries.

You know whether the extraordinary scientific advances beginning in our time extended human life… and whether those additional years made human life better.

You know whether our children and grandchildren inherited a cleaner, healthier planet.

You know whether the nuclear weapons that still sit silently in arsenals around the world remained silent.

We don’t.

And that is what makes writing this letter so difficult.

Because from where we stand in 2026, the future still looks like a blank page. But from where you sit in 2126, we are history.

And history has a peculiar way of speaking to us across generations. There is a saying often attributed to Mark Twain:

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

We don’t know exactly how the next hundred years will rhyme with the hundred that came before us.

But we know enough history to understand that human nature has not changed nearly as much as our technology has.

We know that prosperous societies can become complacent. That free societies can surrender their freedoms.

That ancient hatred can return wearing modern clothes.

And that people who believe themselves immune from history often discover, too late, that they are not.

You know whether we learned those lessons.

You know what we did with the choices that were still ours to make. You know whether the United States remained a free republic.

You know whether freedom of speech survived an age in which people increasingly demanded protection from ideas they disliked… and demanded justice against those who disagreed with them.

You know whether Americans continued to believe that citizenship carried obligations as well as rights.

You know whether we remembered that democracy requires something more difficult than voting… it requires accepting that people with whom we profoundly disagree are still our fellow citizens.

You know whether we preserved institutions imperfectly handed down to us by generations before us, or whether, convinced of our own wisdom, we tore them apart without understanding why they had been built.

You know whether truth still mattered.

That question particularly troubles me.

We live at a moment when almost every human being carries in their pocket access to more information than the greatest libraries of previous centuries could contain.

And yet we increasingly struggle to agree on what is true. There is another saying often attributed to Mark Twain:

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

In Twain’s time, a lie still had to travel by newspaper, telegraph, or word of mouth. In ours, it can travel around the world in seconds.

By the time truth has put on its shoes, the lie may have been seen by millions of people, repeated thousands of times, amplified by algorithms… and accepted as fact.

Technology allows us to communicate instantly across oceans, continents, cultures and languages.

Yet somehow, we seem to have more difficulty talking to the person standing across the street.

We have built machines capable of connecting billions of people.

And we are discovering that connection is not the same thing as communicating.

Perhaps you solved that.

I hope you did.

You also know something else we cannot know. You know what became of the Jewish people.

As I write this, nearly eight decades have passed since the Holocaust and almost eight decades since the rebirth of the State of Israel.

The Jewish people possess something my grandparents’ generation could scarcely have imagined while Jews were being murdered across Europe:

A sovereign Jewish state. A Jewish army.

The ability of Jews, finally, to defend themselves.

And when I think about what happened in 1948, I keep returning to something the Jewish scholar Ruth Wisse has said.

Consider the magnitude of it.

In 1945, the world discovered the full horror of what had been done to the Jews of Europe.

Six million murdered. Entire communities erased. Families destroyed.

A civilization that had flourished in Europe for centuries nearly annihilated.

And then… three years later… Israel.

A people who had been scattered for nearly two thousand years returned to their ancestral homeland and restored Jewish sovereignty.

That was more than the creation of another country.

It was a civilizational resurrection.

Wisse has described the creation of the State of Israel as “the most hopeful moment in civilization since the dove came with the olive leaf to Noah’s Ark.”

Think about what that means.

Three years after one of mankind’s greatest atrocities… not revenge.

Not surrender.

Not disappearance.

Resurrection.

The Jewish people answered an attempt to erase them from history by writing, in capital letters: HERE.

We are still here.

And yet antisemitism, which so many hoped would have been buried beneath the ruins of Auschwitz, is still with us.

It has changed its vocabulary. It has changed its clothing.

It has migrated from churches to political movements, from drawing rooms to universities, from whispered prejudice to social media.

But it survives.

History may not be repeated.

But sometimes it rhymes.

So, I wonder about you.

Is there still a State of Israel in 2126?

Is Hebrew still spoken in the streets of Jerusalem?

Do Jewish children in America still know why they are Jewish? Do they know the Torah?

Do they know where their grandparents and great-grandparents came from?

Do they understand that Judaism is not merely a religion of persecution and remembrance, but a civilization of ideas, argument, family, responsibility, learning, and extraordinary resilience?

Do they understand that they belong to a people connected to one another… and to their ancestral homeland?

Do they still know the meaning of am?

Did we teach them well enough?

Or did we become so comfortable that we forgot that civilizations do not perpetuate themselves automatically?

You already know the answer. We don’t.

And perhaps that is the most humbling thing about writing to you.

Because every great question that causes us anxiety today has become, for you, simply history.

You know whether China and the United States became enemies or found a way to coexist.

You know what happened in the Middle East.

You know whether Russia’s ambitions brought greater war to Europe. You know whether religious extremism had receded or spread.

You know whether democracy expanded or authoritarianism did.

You know whether America remained the world’s indispensable nation… or voluntarily surrendered that role.

You know whether capitalism continued lifting people from poverty while finding ways to temper its excesses.

You know whether our universities rediscovered their purpose as places where ideas could be challenged rather than protected from challenge.

You know whether parents once again taught children that freedom and responsibility are inseparable.

You know whether we learned to disagree without hating one another. And perhaps most important of all:

You know whether we did not forget that a civilization can be lost.

We sometimes behave as though the freedoms surrounding us are part of some natural order.

They are not.

Human history tells a very different story. Freedom is unusual.

Self-government is unusual. Religious liberty is unusual.

The peaceful transfer of political power is unusual.

The right to criticize one’s government without fearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night is unusual.

These things exist because generations before us fought for them, argued for them, sacrificed for them and, when necessary, died for them.

We inherited their work.

You inherited ours.

And so, I find myself wondering what you think of us. Do you look back across these hundred years and say:

They were terribly divided, but when the moment came, they understood what was at stake.

They argued bitterly, but they did not destroy the institutions that allowed them to argue.

They created astonishing technologies but remained masters of those technologies rather than becoming their servants.

They understood that progress did not require abandoning everything that came before them.

They preserved freedom. They defended civilization.

They taught their children who they were.

They left us something worth inheriting.

I hope so.

I hope somewhere in your history books there is gratitude for the generations living at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Not because we were perfect. We certainly are not.

But when confronted with the great questions of our time, we eventually recognized them for what they were.

Tests.

Tests of courage. Tests of judgment. Tests of character.

And tests of whether a free people, blessed with more prosperity, knowledge, and technological power than any generation in human history, possessed enough wisdom to use those gifts well.

You already know whether we passed.

We are still taking the test.

And perhaps that is the message I most want to leave you. The people of 2026 were not characters in a history book.

We were students.

We were husbands and wives. Parents and grandparents.

Immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Believers and nonbelievers.

Republicans and Democrats.

Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people of every faith and of no faith. We worried about our children.

We argued about politics. We went to work.

We paid our bills.

We celebrated weddings and mourned our parents. We laughed.

We fought. We loved. We cried.

And most of us, regardless of our differences, wanted essentially the same thing: to leave our children a world a little better than the one entrusted to us.

Whether we succeeded is no longer our question. It is yours to answer.

And if, on August 22, 2126, you are reading this letter in a nation that is still free, on a planet largely at peace, surrounded by children who know their history but are not imprisoned by it.

Then perhaps you might spare a thought for us.

And say:

Thank God they understood, before it was too late, that the future was depending on them.

Because today, in 2026, we are beginning to understand something you already know:

The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we leave behind.

In 2004, a group of Democratic activists built a central online hub to make campaign donations easier. ActBlue’s founders said they were using the internet to “democratize the least democratic part of the political process,” and by the 2023–24 election cycle, ActBlue was processing $3.8 billion in contributions.

In the third quarter of 2024 alone, nearly 7 million donors made 31.7 million contributions through ActBlue. Those donations totaled $1.55 billion and went to more than 18,000 Democratic and progressive campaigns and groups. That was in just one quarter.

ActBlue is now the dominant online fundraising platform for Democratic politicians, and for thousands of Democratic campaigns, clicking “Donate” sends the supporter straight into ActBlue.

An April 2025 joint House staff report, based on documents from ActBlue and its fraud contractor Sift, showed that in 2023 ActBlue knew it had a fraud problem. Its own employees detected at least 22 major fraud campaigns, some from overseas. In spite of this ActBlue raised its fraud-review thresholds “across the board” in April 2024, calling the changes a “more lenient approach,” leading to even more fraud. 

By July, internal notes admitted that ActBlue was “accepting” more fraud.

Employees reviewing suspicious transactions were trained to “look for reasons to accept contributions.” They were told not to reject a donation because of one suspicious detail. Instead they should “look for the forest and not the trees.” ActBlue’s own notes called this approach “a bit antithetical” to stopping fraud.

American campaign-finance law bans foreign nationals from giving to federal elections. It also bans contributions made in someone else’s name. ActBlue makes both kinds of fraud easy. There are clear cases where someone’s identity was used to donate money through people who never knew about their contributions.

Elizabeth Waffle, an 88-year-old woman in Michigan, was listed as making nearly 15,000 contributions totaling about $150,000 over five years. She lives on a modest pension and told reporters she had made only a few dozen small donations. Clifford Slayman was listed for 7,539 contributions totaling $213,163. He signed an affidavit calling it fraud. Barbara Schmerzler signed an affidavit after 2,549 contributions totaling about $41,000 were listed under her name.

Investigators later found 18 Democrats in Connecticut over the age of 70 whose names were tied to roughly $1.9 million in political contributions. Some said they had made small donations, but their information was then used for many more donations they never knew about.

Someone donated that money in a kind of reverse identity theft. The stolen identity was not used to take money, as in normal identity theft. It was used to give money illegally, and since the name on the donation belongs to a real person, the contribution looks legal. No bill ever goes to the person whose name was used to give the donation, so the person whose identity is stolen is completely unaware.

Moving this kind of money into campaigns by hand would be a logistical nightmare. Someone would have to give cash to large numbers of people and then coordinate their donations to avoid red flags. Small-dollar digital fundraising automates the whole process. Five million dollars can be split into 250,000 contributions of about $20 each in just a few seconds.

Donor-identity theft also helps with marketing. Journalists treat small-dollar fundraising as proof of grassroots support, and parties use fundraising numbers to judge a candidate’s viability. Real donors are drawn to candidates who look like they are gaining momentum, so a sophisticated donor-identity operation could deliver both campaign cash and the appearance of a real political movement.

And in the 2023–2024 election cycle, hostile foreign powers were circling ActBlue like vultures.

During one 30-day stretch in September and October of 2024, ActBlue detected 237 contributions made with prepaid credit cards from foreign IP addresses. Internal documents show that as this kind of fraud grew, the company became more open to it. It continued to raise the thresholds that triggered fraud review and adopted what its own papers called a “more lenient approach.” Its analysis estimated that the change allowed more fraudulent transactions to go through. A few months later, internal notes acknowledged that ActBlue knew it was accepting more fraud.

ActBlue is a partisan group, so it has every incentive to help its side. Accepting fraud helps the campaigns receiving donations whereas rejecting fraud denies those campaigns cash.

By March 2025, according to a second joint staff report, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had either resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave. Five current or former employees invoked the Fifth Amendment a combined 146 times in depositions. Congressional investigators also cited an internal legal analysis from outside counsel warning that ActBlue could be accused of accepting or facilitating foreign-national contributions.

After Congress investigated, ActBlue made some changes. It now requires CVV codes for credit-card donations and blocks foreign IP addresses. Those steps will not stop foreign donors who have valid credit cards with CVV codes (including the prepaid ones), and who use an American IP address through a VPN, but the changes do raise an obvious question: these are common fraud-prevention tools, so why were these basic protections not in place before?

A July 2026 White House report of declassified intelligence says China bought, stole, or hacked the voter-registration data of 220 million Americans. That data, combined with domestic-looking payment methods and a VPN, would give China what it needs to commit donor-identity theft at scale, and in a close election moving just a few percentage points determines who wins.

Beijing has clear interests in who Americans elect. If China can help elect people who favor things that benefit China, it could gain influence over U.S. policy toward Taiwan, Pacific military commitments, tariffs, technology controls, energy, Chinese access to American capital, and scrutiny of Chinese influence operations.

A sophisticated foreign influence operation does not need to bribe an American politician. It only needs to find American politicians who hold views helpful to the foreign government, and then to help those people get elected. Breaking large sums into hundreds or thousands of small donations through ActBlue would accomplish that, and ActBlue was demonstrably vulnerable to exactly this kind of fraud.

The politician, the campaign, and legitimate donors need never even know the fraud occurred.

Qatar too has interests in American elections too, as does Iran, Russia, and a number of other hostile foreign powers.

I have written at length about Qatar’s information jihad operation. A peer-reviewed 2024 study of foreign funding in American universities found nearly $2.8 billion from Qatar, making Qatar the largest foreign source of money for U.S. colleges and universities. The study also found that funding from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation preceded censorship of views critical of Islam, and led directly to higher levels of anti-Semitism on American campuses. Those changes can be traced school by school.

Correlation is not causation, but it is hard to believe Qatar is giving universities that much money with no strings attached. Our universities increasingly teach Qatari talking points. Those talking points are anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) describes Hamas as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood and notes that Qatar hosted Hamas’s political office, along with many of Hamas’ leaders, in Doha. CRS also notes that Qatar hosts the International Union of Islamic Scholars, which it calls a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated tool.

The Qatari regime is fiercely anti-Semitic, and the International Union of Islamic Scholars, in Doha, called for the extermination of the world’s Jewish population by 2033. Following is a direct quote:

Today humanity has realized that you are a threat to the world’s peace and security, and the countdown to your end—which will be imminent, Allah willing—has already begun. Note in your diaries today, not tomorrow, that by the end of the first third of this century, between 2025 and 2033, you will be nothing but history future generations will talk about. Take into consideration that this time the world will not take pity upon you, and that, when its anger boils over, not one of you will be left upon the Earth. Trump’s veto power, or that of whoever succeeds him, will not avail you.

Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks operate in the United States. In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Justice Department presented evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood created a Palestine Committee in the United States specifically to support Hamas.

Qatar has worked hard to change American political views on Israel, Zionism, Hamas, and political Islam, and though I cannot prove that Qatar used ActBlue to fund the campaigns of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Abdul El-Sayed, Zoran Mamdani, or anyone else, Qatar has every reason to help such candidates win, and ActBlue is an open door it could easily use if it has not done so already.

It is no surprise that as Qatari support of American institutions has increased, so too has the anti-Semitism of the public, and with more and more Islamic candidates winning primaries, we need to do a thorough investigation to ensure that Qatari money is not going into our political campaigns.

We usually picture this kind of corruption as foreign agents offering politicians money in exchange for a vote, but it makes far more sense for foreign agents to find sympathetic candidates and support them without the candidates ever knowing. That way, if the funding later comes to light, the candidate is protected from blame and can stay in office.

Suppose an American politician sincerely believes the United States should change its relationship with Israel. Suppose another sincerely believes America should reduce its commitment to defending Taiwan. If they can successfully disguise the source of the money, Qatar and China can put as much money as they want into those campaigns without ever telling the candidates.

I don’t know that hostile foreign powers did donate to American political campaigns, but we do know ActBlue detected donations from foreign IP addresses that used domestic prepaid cards. We know ActBlue loosened its fraud standards even though internal evidence showed the change would let more fraud through. We know employees were trained to “look for reasons to accept contributions.”

We know real Americans have disputed thousands of contributions made in their names.

We know China and other foreign adversaries have collected information about Americans, including hacking the voter data of over 220 million voters. We know China, Qatar, Iran, Russia, and other foreign powers have every strategic reason to influence American elections.

What we do not know is whether any of those governments have already combined these vulnerabilities to pour foreign money into American campaigns at scale. My guess is that they have, and this is a testable hypothesis that starts with Elizabeth Waffle.

Identify every ActBlue transaction she says she did not make. Examine the IP address, device information, transaction history, fraud flags, and other data in ActBlue’s systems. Check whether supposedly unrelated donors used the same payment methods or devices.

Do the same with every other donor who disputes transactions attributed to them. Then follow the money backward.

If the money came from Waffle’s own accounts, the transaction is probably legal. If hundreds or thousands of unrelated contributions all used the same financial sources, that would point to fraud at scale. If the money trail leads overseas, we can follow it.

Congress also needs to subpoena ActBlue’s full databases rather than relying on selected emails and testimony. Payment methods, IP addresses, device information, fraud scores, rejected transactions, accepted suspicious transactions, refunds, and chargebacks can all be analyzed for patterns.

This cannot be a partisan investigation. WinRed and every other major political payment processor should face the same scrutiny. I am starting with ActBlue as we already know it processed fraudulent transactions, but that does not mean ActBlue is alone. We need to investigate all of them. We should also ask whether it makes sense for partisan actors to run such financing operations when they have every incentive to accept fraud.

Is it possible that every sophisticated foreign intelligence and influence operation on Earth looked at a system moving billions of dollars, saw that donations could be funneled through real American identities, and then politely decided to leave our elections alone? It is possible, but unlikely. If I can see how easy this is, we have to assume they can see it too.

I, for one, would like to find out.

We also need practical safeguards to protect future elections. Every online political contribution, no matter how small, should include verified identity information that is cross-checked against government databases in real time. An email should be sent to the person making the donation giving them the option to question it, and to opt-out of future donations.

Prepaid cards, virtual cards, and other anonymous payment methods should be banned for political contributions. Payment processors should be required to automatically flag and reject any donation originating from a foreign IP address or a VPN, with no exceptions.

Platforms like ActBlue and WinRed should be forced to retain device fingerprints, IP logs, and payment-source data for every transaction for at least ten years. Executives should face criminal liability if they knowingly raise fraud thresholds or instruct staff to look for reasons to accept suspicious contributions.

Limits should also be placed on the total number of donations that can come from the same IP address, device, or payment instrument. Finally, a public, searchable database of all contributions under $200 would let journalists and investigators spot patterns of donor-identity theft.

I don’t know that China, Qatar, Iran, Russia, or any other foreign power has already flooded American campaigns with illegal money through ActBlue. What I do know is that the system is wide open for them to do so. ActBlue knew it had a serious fraud problem and lowered its defenses, training staff to look for reasons to accept questionable contributions. 

We do not need to wait for proof to launch a full investigation. Congress should subpoena the full transaction databases of ActBlue, WinRed, and every other major political payment processor, and investigators should start with the disputed donors, following the money backwards.

If we are not willing to take election integrity seriously, we should expect hostile foreign powers to take our lack of election integrity very seriously. We have a right to safe and secure elections, and election security does not begin and end at the ballot box. We also have a right to know that every dollar used to elect an American leader came from someone legally entitled to give it.

Criticizing the left to save the left

For my entire adult life, I cast ballots, made phone calls, and wrote checks exclusively for Democratic candidates. My attraction to the party was not based on utopian fantasies of some perfectly egalitarian paradise, but on basic human empathy and practical logic: the conviction that an open, pluralistic society must protect the vulnerable, safeguard civil rights, and provide a fair shot to everyone—and that we would all be better off for it.

The night Donald Trump won in 2016, I wept. I was getting married a month later and planning to start the family I had long dreamt of; the result felt like the sudden collapse of a stable country around me, of a normal future for me and my children. Yet in that grief, I woke up the next morning with hope and determination: that the shock would serve as an overdue wake-up call for the Democratic Party to recognize the struggles of working-class Americans who felt left behind.

While that hope lingered for some time, buoyed by Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 (whom I also voted for), the opposite happened. Over the ensuing decade, the moral center of the coalition eroded from within—first quietly and slowly and then bursting into the mainstream after October 7, 2023.

Whenever I criticize this drift or the undeniable leftward lurch of recent years, well-meaning friends urge silence: “Why attack our own side when the alternative is so dangerous?” My answer is simple: I criticize the left to save the left. Partisan tribalism demands unconditional defense of your camp; classical liberalism demands self-policing based on universal principles.

Classical liberalism’s deliberate absence of heavy-handed moralism has always been viewed by critics as its greatest vulnerability. We defended that openness on the premise that moral virtue belonged in the private sphere for civil society to uphold. But that system works only if civil society and political leaders actively reinforce virtue and decisively reprimand violations when moral taboos are broken.

In an era where algorithmic feeds and closed primaries create intense structural incentives to champion illiberal ideas on both sides of the aisle, the Democratic Party cannot afford to surrender the moral high ground. Autocratic populism on the right does not excuse moral rot on the left; it makes moral clarity on the left an urgent necessity. By enforcing non-negotiable moral taboos against overt, hateful bigotry and the endorsement of political violence, we can win back the exhausted moderate majority that fears the extremists being welcomed into our ranks.

I. Big Tents Require Moral Guardrails: The Lesson of the DSA

A healthy political party must be a broad coalition. A big tent accommodates wide-ranging disagreements over tax rates, healthcare models, trade, and industrial policy. But a tent without guardrails is a structure without a foundation.

Pluralism is not boundless appeasement. It requires strict adherence to liberal democratic baselines: universal human dignity, equal protection under the law, the rejection of tribal discrimination, and an absolute taboo against celebrating violence or terror.

The trajectory of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) illustrates what happens when those baselines are abandoned:

• The Original Premise: In the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, the early DSA operated as a reformist, pro-labor faction. Even when its economic proposals were out of touch with market realities, its participation in Democratic primaries operated within the broad norms of civic liberalism.
• The Illiberal Takeover: Over recent years, the organization was captured by ideological absolutists who replaced labor advocacy with rigid oppressor-versus-oppressed dogmas, championed anti-pluralist hostility, and rationalized atrocities against civilians.
• The Internal Exodus: Longtime democratic socialists and founding figures like Maurice Isserman publicly resigned in protest, explicitly calling the organization’s post-October 7 posture “politically and morally bankrupt.” When an organization’s own founders walk away because it celebrates terror and exiles internal dissent, mainstream political parties cannot pretend that faction remains a benign partner.

Welcoming illiberal factions into a governing coalition without demanding adherence to basic, liberal democratic and moral principles does not expand the tent; it hollows it out.

II. Precedents of Moral Boundary Enforcement

American political history proves that enduring coalitions survive not by indulging their fringes, but by actively exiling them:

• William F. Buckley + the John Birch Society: In the 1960s, Buckley recognized that the Birch Society’s conspiratorial extremism threatened the intellectual and moral credibility of conservatism. He used National Review to systematically purge them from mainstream conservative ranks.
• Bill Clinton + Sister Souljah: In 1992, Bill Clinton addressed the Rainbow Coalition and directly rebuked rhetoric that justified retaliatory racial violence, demonstrating that a modern governing party must never excuse bigotry for partisan convenience.
• The Bipartisan Quarantine of David Duke: When former Klansman David Duke sought mainstream legitimacy through electoral politics, leaders across both parties explicitly denounced him, refusing to let partisan opportunism normalize white supremacy.

Healthy parties draw lines. They quarantine extremist rhetoric rather than sanitizing it to protect a factional flank.

III. To Democratic Leadership: Senator Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries + DNC Chair Ken Martin:

Moral leadership requires more than legislative whip counts or party management. As the leaders of both our congressional caucuses and the national party apparatus, your mandate is to enforce the party’s moral perimeter.

• Condemn Ideological Extremism Directly: Disagreeing behind closed doors is insufficient. When candidates or elected officials under your banner traffic in anti-Semitism, dehumanize supporters of Israel, excuse calls for violence, or fail to condemn allies who do, you must publicly denounce them by name.
• Withhold Institutional Resources: The Democratic National Committee and congressional campaign committees must not be passive conduits for extremist normalization. A candidate who embraces bigotry or maintains uncritical alliances with illiberal factions must not receive party resources, coordinated funding, committee assignments, or institutional endorsements.
• End the Fear of Primaries: The calculation that pandering to vocal activist factions prevents primary challenges is shortsighted and demonstrably false. Leaders of moral clarity like Ritchie Torres and John Fetterman have proven that standing firm against extremism and rejecting fringe dogma builds durable, winning coalitions. When leaders display spine, they may alienate a vocal fringe, but they earn the trust of the broad moderate majority that decides national and swing-district elections.

IV. To Democratic Elected Officials + Candidates:

Public office is a public trust. What you tolerate around you defines what you endorse.

• Audit Your Associations and Confront Your Colleagues: Accountability applies not only to what you say, but to whom you stand with. Refuse to share stages with or accept endorsements from figures who promote bigotry. Furthermore, hold your colleagues to the same standard: confront their toxic associations privately first, but if they refuse to correct course, call them out publicly.
• Reject Semantic Word Games: Stop offering rhetorical cover for slogans like “globalize the intifada” or dog-whistles that rationalize harassment under the guise of activism. When words incite hostility against a community, call it what it is—hateful bigotry—without caveat.
• Govern for the Whole Civic Body: Focus your mandates on public safety, civil liberties, and the material well-being of all constituents, rather than weaponizing civic platforms to fuel geopolitical hatreds that make your own streets unsafe.

V. To the Electorate: The Ultimate Enforcers

Elected officials respond to incentives. As long as voters provide automatic, unconditional party loyalty, leadership has no reason to police its ranks.

• Define Your Red Lines: It is entirely reasonable to reject the modern Republican Party. But declaring that you will vote for any Democratic nominee regardless of character or conduct surrenders all democratic leverage and accountability.
• Make Support Conditional: Tell your representatives that your vote is earned, not owned. Demand that candidates articulate their commitment to equal protection, civil discourse, and the explicit rejection of illiberal extremism before you knock on a door, donate a dollar, or cast a ballot.
• Vote on Standards, Not Slogans: When you cast your ballot, don’t just look at what candidates say—look at what they appear to tolerate. Ask yourself: Who is more likely to stand up to the radicals in their party trying to pull them further into extremism? Get rid of the default selection of D or R.

A political party that cannot define what it stands against will soon stand for nothing at all. It is time to restore the moral guardrails of the Democratic Party—not by abandoning our empathy, but by demonstrating the courage to defend it.

A silver SS skull ring discovered inside the stomach of a dead lion is an unforgettable way to begin an historical novel. It is an image so unexpected that it immediately raises a question: How did it get there? From that striking premise, Yishay Ishi Ron’s The Girl Who Rode the White Lion unfolds across two timelines, linking post-war New York with Nazi Germany through a story that is at once historical mystery, survival narrative, and meditation on memory. Yet the mystery is only the doorway. Beneath its suspense lies a quieter exploration of courage, compassion, and the unexpected places where humanity survives.

That raises another question: why another Holocaust novel?

It is a fair question. The shelves are already filled with stories of persecution, survival, and remembrance. Every new novel that enters this landscape carries a responsibility, not simply to revisit familiar history, but to deepen our understanding of it. It must offer readers something more than events retold. Ron’s novel earns its place by recovering a little-known story of moral courage and using fiction not to replace history, but to illuminate it.

Inspired by the remarkable story of Germany’s Althoff circus family, later honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for sheltering Jews during the Second World War, Ron blends historical reality with imaginative storytelling. His novel is neither conventional Holocaust fiction nor a straightforward historical mystery. Instead, it draws strength from both, inviting readers to experience history through the emotional lives of its characters.

The novel’s 1957 storyline begins with the discovery of the SS ring during the autopsy of a lion at New York’s Central Park Zoo. That mystery gradually leads readers back to Germany in 1938, where Sarah Frank, a young Jewish girl fleeing the violence of Kristallnacht, finds sanctuary in the most unexpected of places: a travelling circus. The investigation provides the narrative framework, but it is not the novel’s true purpose. Beneath its suspense lies a thoughtful meditation on memory, courage, and the choices ordinary people make when confronted with extraordinary evil.

Ron wisely resists reducing history to a lesson. Rather than explaining the rise of Nazi persecution through historical exposition, he allows readers to experience it through Sarah’s increasingly precarious world. The terror of Kristallnacht, the tightening restrictions placed upon Jewish families, and the constant uncertainty of survival are seen not through statistics or official records, but through one young girl’s eyes. History becomes immediate because it becomes personal.

Perhaps the novel’s most distinctive achievement is its setting. Holocaust fiction often unfolds in ghettos, camps, or hidden rooms—places that have become familiar within the literature. Ron chooses something altogether different.

The circus is a place of spectacle, but, in this novel, it becomes something else: a refuge.

That choice proves remarkably effective. A travelling circus exists on society’s margins, inhabited by performers, animal trainers, musicians, and wanderers whose lives have never comfortably fitted conventional expectations. In Ron’s hands, that world becomes a moral counterpoint to the ideology of Nazi conformity. Those whom society regards as outsiders become the very people willing to risk everything to protect another outsider.

Knowing that this aspect of the story is inspired by the real Althoff family gives the novel additional emotional weight. Ron does not simply borrow their history; he builds upon it with respect, using fiction to illuminate possibilities that historical records can only hint at. The result is a story that honors historical courage while reminding readers that acts of extraordinary compassion often emerge from the most unexpected places.

The white lion gradually becomes the novel’s emotional center. At first it appears to be little more than an extraordinary circus attraction. By the final pages, however, it has become something altogether deeper.

The lion is not simply symbolic because it is rare.

It also cannot disguise what it is.

Sarah cannot either.

In a world obsessed with identifying, categorizing, and persecuting those deemed “different,” the white lion becomes a quiet emblem of visible otherness. Yet Ron refuses to equate difference with weakness. Instead, both Sarah and the lion embody a dignity that survives persecution without surrendering itself. The symbolism grows naturally from the narrative rather than being imposed upon it, allowing readers to discover its meaning instead of being instructed how to interpret it.

Ron writes with a cinematic eye. His descriptions of circus life are vivid without becoming sentimental. One senses the rhythm of rehearsals, the movement of performers and animals, and the fragile illusion of normality maintained beneath the shadow of war. Moments of suspense alternate with quieter passages of reflection, creating an emotional rhythm that mirrors Sarah’s own journey through fear, hope, and resilience.

For all its historical weight, The Girl Who Rode the White Lion never loses sight of the pleasures of storytelling. Ron understands how to sustain suspense without allowing it to overwhelm the novel’s emotional core. Each revelation draws readers further into Sarah’s story, while the dual timeline steadily deepens the mystery. Even those who come to the novel for its historical setting will likely find themselves turning pages to discover how the two narratives ultimately converge.

The novel’s dual timeline is handled with equal confidence. The investigation in 1957 does more than solve a mystery; it demonstrates how history continues to echo across generations. The past refuses to remain buried because its consequences continue to shape the present. Each discovery uncovers not only forgotten events but forgotten lives.

Not every reader will be persuaded by the discovery of an SS ring inside a lion’s stomach. It is undeniably theatrical, and some may feel the coincidence stretches plausibility. Yet Ron never confuses fiction with historical documentation. Instead, he uses invention to illuminate emotional truths that archival records alone cannot fully convey. The mystery succeeds because it transforms remembrance into an act of discovery, inviting readers to uncover history alongside the characters rather than merely observing it from a distance.

When I finished the novel, I realized that the mystery itself had become almost secondary. What stayed with me was not the explanation of the ring, but the image of the circus itself, a place usually associated with spectacle transformed, in Ron’s imagination, into a sanctuary.

That transformation says something profound about courage. Heroism does not always emerge from positions of authority or power. Sometimes it belongs to ordinary people living on society’s margins; people who choose compassion when indifference would be safer.

As the number of living Holocaust survivors continues to diminish, literature assumes an increasingly important role alongside testimony, archives, and memorials. Fiction cannot replace history, nor should it try. What it can do is help readers imagine the lives behind the historical record and preserve emotional truths that facts alone cannot fully convey. Used responsibly, storytelling becomes another form of remembrance.

Some stories remain with us because of unforgettable characters. Others because they illuminate history with unusual clarity.

The Girl Who Rode the White Lion stayed with me because it accomplished both.

Long after the mystery of the ring is resolved, the image that lingers is the white lion itself, not simply because it is extraordinary, but because it comes to embody the novel’s deepest concerns, visible difference, quiet endurance, and the stubborn persistence of dignity. Like Sarah, it cannot become something other than what it is.

Drawing inspiration from the courage of the real Althoff circus family while weaving an original story of survival, Yishay Ishi Ron reminds us that remembrance depends not only upon preserving the past, but upon continuing to tell it with imagination, compassion, and moral seriousness. In giving history a human face, The Girl Who Rode the White Lion demonstrates how fiction, when grounded in historical truth and guided by empathy, can help ensure that memory continues to speak to the present.

The recent violent disruption of Shabbat services at Central Synagogue was not an isolated incident—it was the visible culmination of an escalating environment of intimidation. Across New York City, Jewish residents face verbal attacks, harassment, and overt discrimination on public transit, university campuses, K–12 schools, sidewalks, and workplaces. This crisis is not confined to houses of worship; it compromises the daily safety and fundamental rights of individual New Yorkers in every public space.

To Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

Leadership is measured by the boundaries you set and the atmosphere you cultivate. Your persistent demonization of Israel dehumanizes the vast majority of New Yorkers who support Israel and its right to exist and defend itself. In practice, extremist actors treat anti-Israel rhetoric as open permission to target Jewish individuals and institutions across the five boroughs—and beyond.

To govern New York City credibly, you must adhere to basic standards of executive responsibility:

1. End the weaponization of City Hall against Israel: Your role is the civic governance and safety of New York City, not using municipal power to wage political campaigns against Israel that directly endanger your own constituents.
2. Cease excusing violent slogans: Stop offering semantic rationalizations for rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada.” When rhetoric incites hostility against a community, leadership must call it what it is—anti-Semitism—without caveat.
3. Demand accountability within your political and social orbit: Draw an unequivocal line against individuals and political allies who traffic in anti-Jewish hostility or justify harassment under the banner of political activism.

To Governor Kathy Hochul:

Passivity from the state executive is unacceptable. Polite disagreements or generic statements of concern are far beneath a person entrusted with your responsibilities.

As governor, you are the ultimate guarantor of civil rights and public safety in New York State. You must explicitly denounce Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric, publicly reprimand his administration for prioritizing anti-Israel hostility to the obvious and documentable cost of municipal safety, and enforce state-level oversight to ensure Jewish citizens and all New Yorkers are protected against pervasive intimidation.

Statements issued after an altercation occurs will not protect anyone—in fact, they are an inducement, because criminals are never cowed by scoldings. Both city and state leadership will be judged by whether you dismantle the permission structures of hate before legitimized hostility turns into further violence.

Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is documented to have received funding from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), exposed in federal court in 2008 for having laundered money for Hamas, the terrorist organization which committed the massacre of October 7, 2023. CAIR is an apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global syndicate that has supported Sunni Islamic terrorism worldwide since its founding in 1928 by Nazi enthusiast Hassan al-Banna. It should also interest the state—indeed federal—Department of Justice that the Brotherhood’s many terrorist offshoots include al-Qaeda, which carried out the massacres of 9/11. This is precisely why the mayor has been repeatedly told by the victims’ families not to attend this year’s commemoration.

To the public:

Europe has come to painfully and belatedly recognize that empty, perfunctory gestures of sympathy only lead to the making of more room to kill Jews. Moral leadership demands more of our leaders and its citizens, who, throughout history, have possessed all the power, but accepted bystander status instead.

America must not make the same mistakes as Europe, which welcomed in millions of unvetted migrants from the most anti-Western of cultures because of a belief that past colonialism must be punished by a new colonialism. These people neither assimilated into European culture, nor agree with Europe’s supposed ethic of “tolerance.” Today, far fewer Jews remain in Europe than in 1945.

White Rose Magazine, named after Sophie and Hans Scholl’s anti-Nazi student resistance group, is obliged to respond in kind to any instance of politics being organized against the Jews and Western values. Given that most have forgotten all the reasons to do so, we choose to remember why such trends do not end with the Jews. With five churches torched in the city since Mamdani took office, it is clear that even if all the Jews leave, no one is safe.

Why liberal democracy requires us to confront the one ideology we are forbidden to criticize.

Societies and sub-communities are defined by what they tolerate, not by their high-minded manifestos. When a group refuses to enforce its own moral guardrails—especially when social, financial, or political incentives push it to look the other way—its stated values erode until they become meaningless. While this story is not exclusive to Islam, it is arguably the defining story of Islam.

In a healthy pluralistic democracy, accountability relies on a double guardrail. First, sub-communities self-police. Internal shaming and social disapproval are the first line of defense when a member violates foundational norms. This self-correction works best when it comes from within the tribe. Ongoing violations should result in more severe social consequences, up until total excommunication from the group. But if a group fails to discipline its violators, the behavior metastasizes, forcing the broader host society to step in with escalating social and legal consequences. Catching and stamping out illiberalism early, inside the group, is always less painful than resolving a full-blown institutional and cross-tribal crisis later.

For decades, however, anyone who raised concerns about the illiberal and violent elements within Islamic orthodoxy was routinely branded an “Islamophobe.” That label worked like a social threat, teaching millions of people to self-censor simply to avoid public stigma (disclosure: I was one of those people). Rationalized under the guise of politeness or cultural humility, this enforced silence has allowed serious threats to liberal democracy to grow unchecked.

To break this silence, we must draw a clear line: genuine hatred, dehumanization, and bigotry directed at individual Muslims simply for their faith are vile and deserve total rejection. But honest, principled critique of an ideological and political system is not bigotry. Weaponizing “Islamophobia” to collapse the distinction between anti-Muslim hatred and legitimate theological critique is a bad-faith maneuver designed to make an entire belief system immune to questioning.

Silence is not empathy. It is a surrender of the liberal order. We need to talk about Islam directly, because it presents a unique, large-scale, and structurally unchecked challenge to liberal democracies—and because it remains the one global ideology we are discouraged from confronting.

The Dominance of Orthodoxy

To treat Islam as merely one of many equivalent personal faiths is to ignore its history, theology, and foundational texts. Islam is not simply a system of private devotion; it is a complete social order that explicitly claims authority over both the individual and the state (din, dunya, dawla).

Islam holds no monopoly on dangerous scriptures or followers inclined to interpret them violently. Christianity and Judaism contained plenty of illiberal doctrines, and their reform was neither easy nor peaceful. It took centuries of brutal conflict, internal dissent, and immense personal sacrifice by brave reformers to ensure that moderation won out and religious authority yielded to secular law. That struggle established a vital precedent: divine law must submit to individual conscience and democratic legislation. Mainstream Islamic orthodoxy has built no comparable, functioning self-limiting mechanisms.

Whether one views fundamentalism as inherent to the foundational texts or as a historically contingent reality, the practical outcome is the same: hardline interpretations currently hold institutional dominance. The reason reform has failed to take root at scale is not a lack of moderate Muslims who reject Sharia and jihad. It is that orthodox Islam remains structurally totalizing, claiming jurisdiction over both adherents and non-believers. This places internal reformers in immediate physical and social peril the moment they challenge traditionalist authority. But while internal dissidents face immense personal risk, broader civil society faces no such constraint. Host societies have a duty to apply uncompromising normative pressure—demanding a clear, explicit line that makes religious practice and what it preaches compatible with liberal democracy.

Where other major traditions were forced to recontextualize their violent and illiberal scriptures, dominant Islamic institutions continue to preserve doctrines incompatible with a free society:

• Political Jihad: The doctrine of coercive or subversive struggle to advance the political dominance of the faith.
• The Supremacy of Sharia: The claim that divine law overrides democratic legislation, denying equal rights based on gender or creed, and demanding severe penalties for apostasy and blasphemy.

Nowhere is this surrender clearer than in our self-imposed taboos surrounding the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Following repeated threats and acts of violent retribution, Western media, publishing houses, and public institutions quietly capitulated—adopting a de facto Islamic blasphemy code out of fear. When a liberal democracy allows violent intimidation to dictate what can be drawn, written, or published, it accepts that religious dogma takes precedence over its first and most essential right: freedom of speech. And if we have already agreed to compromise on our most treasured right, then is it that unthinkable that we’ll eventually succumb to the same degradations of our liberal democracy that have been seen in Europe, from “no-go zones” to Sharia councils to public calls for prayer?

If Islam is to coexist with liberal democracy, it will require a formal theological break—one where a critical mass of Muslim moderates explicitly severs ties with fundamentalist orthodoxy and builds institutions that openly repudiate political jihad and Sharia legal claims. Until that happens, a community that refuses to purge its radical elements will inevitably be defined by them.

The Voices We Fail to Listen To

We are often told that outside critique of Islam is inherently bigoted. Yet much ink has been spilled by current and former Muslims, as well as courageous scholars, warning of the structural dangers posed by unchecked orthodoxy. From internal reformers pleading for theological reinterpretation to ex-Muslim dissidents who face real physical threats for speaking out, the most unsparing assessments of Islamic doctrine frequently come from those who know it best.

These critics point to a fundamental distinction between Islam and other major world religions. As scholar A. C. Rosenthal articulated recently, while most modern faiths have accepted a boundary between personal conscience and public law, orthodox Islam remains uniquely structured around asserting political and legal jurisdiction over people who never chose it.

The tragedy is that when Western gatekeepers shut down honest debate to prevent “Islamophobia,” they do not protect vulnerable minorities—they betray the very reformists and dissidents fighting for freedom from within. By treating orthodox institutions as the sole voice of the Muslim community, the host society starves internal reformers of the support they desperately need to challenge fundamentalist authority.

The Institutional Incentive Problem

This failure of support creates a dangerous incentive structure within traditionalist institutions. It is easy enough for public figures or religious organizations to issue boilerplate condemnations of terrorism after a tragedy occurs—though even then, political leaders often hesitate when pressed to denounce specific extremist networks or hostile foreign regimes.

The real test lies in what is tolerated and rewarded from the pulpit and the flock day in and day out. While comprehensive empirical data on internal congregational dynamics is difficult to gather, the underlying incentive structure facing religious leaders is stark: Which cleric is more likely to face internal pushback, loss of funding, or a drop in followers—one who unequivocally denounces political jihad, rejects Sharia legal supremacy, and champions absolute freedom of conscience, or one who speaks the traditional language of orthodoxy?

When fundamentalist interpretations carry low social costs and high communal rewards—while reformist positions carry severe personal risks—the trajectory of the institution is set. Recent polling indicating that 44 percent of Muslim Americans hold a favorable view of Hamas, whatever the methodological caveats, points to a troubling reality: support for illiberalism and violence is not a negligible fringe, but a metastasizing strain that internal and external gatekeepers have failed to contain.

This challenge is exacerbated when sub-communities form insular physical or social enclaves. Geographic concentration and cultural isolation make it easier for fundamentalist norms to grow unhindered by the assimilative pressures of the host society. When insularity is combined with a host society terrified of being labeled bigoted, a dangerous shield is created. Whether dealing with radical pulpit rhetoric or systemic corruption within community institutions—such as the recent public oversight failures surrounding insular programs in Minnesota—any outside effort to enforce universal legal or moral standards is routinely met with accusations of racism or “Islamophobia.” Too often, host-society gatekeepers back down, allowing illiberalism to entrench itself within the enclave until the damage is already done. Without strong, external normative pressure from broader civil society demanding adherence to liberal democratic guardrails, the radical fringe will continue to control the mainstream.

Reclaiming Civic Enforcement

To understand how host societies must respond, we need to be precise about what enforcement actually means. State coercion, speech suppression, and religious tests have no place in a free society. The state’s role is strictly bound by the rule of law: it must intervene only when statutes are broken, or when sub-communities demand legal exemptions that violate equal treatment under the law.

Beyond the law lies the essential realm of civic boundaries. Pluralistic societies depend on strong cultural taboos to protect their foundational values: individual liberty, equal rights regardless of gender or creed, and the absolute separation of church and state.

When individuals or institutions advocate for doctrines that directly conflict with these principles, the response of civil society must not be polite silence or accommodating deference. Shaming illiberal ideas is a necessary cultural tool. Those who promote doctrines incompatible with democracy—along with the opportunistic politicians who court them—must be publicly challenged, named as anti-democratic, and socially ostracized.

This is not a call for McCarthyism, permanent blacklisting, or “canceling” Muslims. To prevent civic enforcement from devolving into mob rule, a liberal society must always maintain the open door principle: a permanent offer of redemption. Ostracism is directed specifically at those who explicitly advocate for illiberalism and those who refuse to police their own ranks. But the door remains open to anyone ready to renounce fundamentalism, reject Sharia legal supremacy, and explicitly align with the foundational values of a free society.

We must extend to Islam the exact same unsparing intellectual critique that we apply to any other belief system. To remain silent out of social fear is not tolerance. It is an act of cowardice that abandons internal reformers, destabilizes host communities and societies, and surrenders the liberal order to the very doctrines seeking to dismantle it. We need to talk about Islam—openly, critically, and without apology.

Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, The Odyssey, has inspired legions of fans who never once gave a whit about ancient Greece and its contribution to Western culture. That’s a positive outcome if reviving the canon of classical literature is important to you. Humanities majors, rejoice!

But the film also serves as an important object lesson for both classical liberalism and modern Europe, one that may be less cinematic but should not be left on the cutting room floor. The most haunting metaphor from both The Iliad and The Odyssey—that nifty but bloody military maneuver that guaranteed victory for the Greeks in the Trojan War—applies to another more contemporary deployment of a Trojan horse.

In Nolan’s film (though not in Homer’s text), Odysseus, the wily warrior who conjured the entire scheme, was left traumatized by its aftermath—the slaughter of all those Trojan men, women, and children—which no doubt lengthened his travails and led to roadblocks on his way home.

We’re told never to look a gift horse in the mouth. Yet, the craftsman of that ultimate equine gift, Odysseus, knew that it’s probably good practice to more heavily scrutinize a gift. One never knows whether it may contain a surprise from which the beneficiary may never recover.

Contemporary Europeans know a little something about booby-trapped gifts. The West has been led to believe for well over a century that immigration is a national gift—to be given, and to receive. The mass infusion of talent and energy—that innate quest to seek the opportunities that free nations offer; to join in the service of nation building and self-improvement—can only enhance the collective experience of the country.

But Europeans, and perhaps soon Americans, too, now know that immigration can also make a country worse. If the newly incoming are not properly vetted—if their arrival was not motivated by the pursuit of happiness but rather a mission of conquest; if they flash a grateful, friendly face at the border that changes into one more fierce at the local mosque—a national threat materializes, internally, without the mess that military invasions produce.

A Trojan horse can come in many shapes and sizes, and from various possible directions.

This was bound to happen with Islam, which is both a religion and a political movement—“political” in its determination to both govern Islamic societies and conquer other lands to extend Islam’s influence. In taking an honest look at Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Nigeria, it looks as if the IRGC, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Boko Horam are much more focused on spreading violence, terror, and conquest than the spiritual health of their people. It is difficult to deny that the politics of Islam, which is military in nature, often overshadows its religious pretensions. In this way, Islam, especially as practiced by the regime occupying Iran, could not possibly be more different from the Vatican.

Indeed, the spreading of Sharia law throughout the world, especially in Western nations, is not a benign theological, hypothetical exercise. It’s nothing like the study of Talmud or a faithful reading of Christian scripture. The Qur’an, and the many Islamic Hadiths, speak plainly that Allah is the one true God—the final word on religious authority—and the prophet, Muhammad, is Allah’s messenger, making him the one true prophet.

This being the 21st century—with its many interfaith imperatives and mandates for religious pluralism—we are reassured by theologians that Islam’s core beliefs are not rigid articles of faith. They are, instead, mere religious exaggerations that no Muslim actually believes. After all, devout Christians don’t necessarily believe that Jesus walked on water, and most Jews attend synagogues without holding fast to the signs and wonders of Moses parting the Red Sea.

But Islam is different. The literal translation of its name is “submission.” Choosing how one practices the Islamic faith is not an option; there are no denominations offering Muslims ways to be more casual about their devotion to Allah. It’s not like a self-identified Christian who doesn’t turn the other cheek, or a practicing Jew who is wishy-washy on observing dietary laws. A religion that goes by the name “submission” is completely insistent upon the obligation to commit to Islam’s non-negotiable beliefs and doctrines.

It should be noted that, unlike other world religions, Islam is the one that has resisted any attempt at reform. So-called “moderate” Muslims share the same beliefs as the Mu’min—the most devout. And there really aren’t any “reformist” Muslims. “Submission” means what it says: no loopholes; no modifications on the menu. Catholics took a hard look at the New Testament and the Gospels at the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which took place over a three-year period in the early 1960s, resulting in improved relations with other faiths and a willingness to adapt to the modern world. Judaism has centuries of experience re-evaluating its understanding of Torah. There are different denominations—the largest being Reform Judaism.

No such internal audit has ever taken place in Islam. And yet, most Muslims believe that “submission” must also apply to infidels—because, as the world’s youngest religion, Islam represents the final word, one that must supersede all others. No society can be expected to accept religion on such uncompromising terms.

But there is something else that tells you everything you need to know: Muhammad is a prophet with a side hustle. The Prophet may be his public persona, but his preferred occupation is warlord and supreme commander of the armies of Islam.

Imagine if Jesus Christ and Moses were also generals. What would that say about Christianity and Judaism—and the entire Judeo-Christian framework? Are they organized around theological imperatives, or military doctrines? Jesus is the Prince of Peace. His Sermon on the Mount is a pacifist’s creed. Moses never makes it to the Promised Land. He gets left behind as Joshua takes command of the ragtag Hebrew army to do battle against the Canaanites and Hittites. 

The presumption is, and should always be, that prophets never have blood on their hands—but that’s not true in the Islamic faith.

Muhammad appointed no one else to lead Muslims into battle to extend Islam’s influence over other nations. When the Qur’an speaks of caliphates—and the warfare required to create them—it isn’t kidding around:

• “When the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them…” (Qur’an 9:5)
• “Fight those who do not believe in Allah…” (9:29)
• “Fight them until there is no more persecution and religion are devoted entirely to Allah…” (8:39)
• “The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims fight against the Jews, and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide behind a stone or a tree. The stone or tree would say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him…’” (Sahih Muslim 2922)

Nowhere in either the Old or New Testaments can such similar language be found.

When most people think about Islam’s war against the West, they think of acts of terrorism committed by al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Images of 9/11; the Boston Marathon bombing; the London tube and Madrid train bombings; the Bali bombings and Mumbai attacks; and the shootings and suicide bombings in France at the Bataclan, cafés, kosher market, and Charlie Hebdo all readily come to mind.

There are many others. And I am leaving out Israel and its forever to be mourned morning nightmare on 10/7. But long before there was terrorism there were conventional wars launched largely by invading Muslim armies into Europe. Terrorism is only the most contemporary iteration of Islam seeking to kill infidels and claim hegemony over Christian lands.

It goes back as far as the invasion of Spain (711), then the Battle of Tours (Poitiers) in 732, followed by the great Crusades (1095–1291), the Siege of Malta (1565), the Battle of Lepanto (1571), the Battle of Vienna (1683), the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), and the Balkan and Russo-Turkish Wars that traversed both the 18th and 19th centuries from 1737 all the way to 1916. (There are other Islamic-Christian wars I have omitted.)

Islam has been busy fighting Christians and Jews for nearly its entire existence. This is the “religion of peace”? On what planet is that true? 

None of the battles listed above involved Jews or Israel. Israel didn’t become a nation until 1948. Ask the decimated Christian populations in Nigeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Bethlehem how amenable Muslims are to interfaith, multicultural relations.

We are repeatedly told that the problem Islam has with the West is solely limited to a tiny population of Jews who have reclaimed their also tiny ancestral homeland to create the world’s one Jewish state. Then why has Islam been at war with Christians during the 2,000 years that Jews have lived in exile?

The problem Islam has always had with the West is Western civilization itself, which is predominately a Christian enterprise, with a little help from the Jews. Israel is not the problem but the pretext. The real target—the true trophy for Islam—is Christianity and the West. And they prove that every day—if anyone is paying attention to what has been happening throughout Europe.

Of course, they don’t teach anything about that in middle and high schools, in colleges and universities, throughout the West. The mere mention of such historical red-letter dates in which Islam made war against the West is deemed “Islamophobic.” That’s right: we now live in a world where even calling attention to the direct link between Islam and terrorism is a hate crime. In the United Kingdom, I would already be locked up for writing that sentence.

Muslims have been surfing on a multicultural, politically correct, woke wave with astonishing success. To criticize Islam is “racism,” even though Islam is a religion and not a race. To call attention to Islamic extremism is “Islamophobia” even though terrorism, which is disproportionately committed by Muslims, is intentionally terrifying and should evoke the fear that gives rise to the phobia that dare not speak its name.

Surely not all Muslims are a threat to the Western world—whether they live in the Middle East, North Africa, or Persian Gulf, or have received asylum and established residency as citizens (and not sleeper cells) throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

But there are 2 billion Muslims in the world. Polling by the Pew Research Center has indicated that a majority of Muslims worldwide believe in a strict adherence to Sharia law. (In some nations, it is as high as 90%.) That means that such Muslims accept permissibly raping female infidels, the taking of Muslim child brides, the torching of homosexuals, the killing of apostates, and the dismemberment, stoning, beheadings, and lashings of wives or daughters whose only crime may have been listening to music, learning to read, or showing a strand of hair in public.

All of this is in compete service of accelerating the date of the next caliphate.

You don’t need 2 billion Muslims to instantly give the West an unwanted makeover. Tens of millions will do. Just look at the hundreds of Sharia courts throughout Europe, the “no-go zones,” the public calls to prayer on public streets in nation after nation—the many allowances made for Islam, the forsaking of law enforcement, all on account of either genuine fear or misguided tolerance.

There are those—former Muslims and some political analysts—who honestly wonder whether Islam is ultimately a religion. Perhaps it’s a military doctrine masquerading as a religion. Its true faith and unconcealed intentions are the creation of a global caliphate. Religion may be merely a loss leader.

This is how much damage Islamists have done to Islam. Its chief critics wonder whether it is even entitled to have religious pretensions. Are Muslims children of Allah, or are they Muhammad’s mercenary army?

The complete dismissal of Islam’s political, militaristic ambitions—because of Western naïveté, paternalism, white guilt, multicultural excess, and unenforced immigration laws—is folly. It is indeed a threat to democracy and liberal culture in its rejection of the separation between mosque and state, free speech, open inquiry, religious pluralism, female empowerment, homosexual rights, and the rule of secular law.

Leaving aside terrorism, Muslims with Islamist inclinations are now both office holders and running for office, often under the façade of “socialism,” but caliphates, covertly, lurk behind, waiting patiently in the pole position.

We have a prime example in New York City. Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor on a “socialist” platform. If you hadn’t read his previous posts and videos about Israel—“Globalize the Intifada!”—you may have been completely surprised by his unrelenting focus on Israel. Immediately upon taking office, he discarded the now standard definition of anti-Semitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). That maneuver allowed violent protests outside of synagogues, and inciteful rhetoric that has led to multiple attacks against Jewish New Yorkers.

The ostensible political agenda here is not one that encourages debates over public policy. It instead more resembles the submission demanded by Islam, all fait accompli: rich white people are all racists and “Islamophobes”; property owners must be stripped of their rights; Israel is an illegitimate state; and all Israelis deserve to die. And since Mamdani won’t denounce the slogan “Globalize the Intifada!”, he must wish the same fate for New York Jewry—his constituents.

Islam is not all that much different from the Trojan horse that ominously rolled into Troy—the failure of governments to perform the necessary due diligence in gleaning the hidden intentions of uninvited guests. Men wrapped in tubular keffiyehs and women whose entire bodies, including their faces, are covered up, are difficult to read.

This is a Trojan horse shaped by humanitarian gestures and misguided policy. Such benign neglect and blindness to duplicity can prove to be as lethal as canon fire, ballistic missiles, or nuclear weapons—rendering an entire continent as traumatized as Nolan’s Odysseus after the Trojan War.

Inside mosques throughout the West, terrorism is discussed and supported even if not personally practiced. Does that mean that they are both houses of worship and strategic strongholds? Many Muslims abide by Sharia law over the law of their land. They have no interest in assimilation and do not wish their host nations well. Some would happily burn a flag and march in parades that call for jihad against Jews, Israel, and the United States. Such people are not mere Manchurian Candidates; they are ticking time bombs that aim to implode Western nations—from the inside-out.

The United States may be relatively new to all this, but the signs are everywhere. Once that first American flag was torched in Dearborn, Michigan, less than two years ago, followed by the Islamic ditty “Death to America!”, Islamists within the United States essentially said, “Game on!” Dearborn is the only city in America with a Muslim majority, a Muslim mayor, and a city council that is comprised entirely of Muslims. No surprise: Dearborn is within Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s congressional district.

Not long after that American flag was set aflame, Mamdani was elected to govern New York City; and Islamists may soon claim several congressional seats and a place in the United States Senate. Candidates such as Michigan’s Mohamed El‑Sayed, who is running for a Senate seat; and aspiring congresspersons Adam Hisham Hamawy, from New Jersey, and Aisha Wahab, from California, might join incumbents Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, and Lateefah Simon.

These candidates and elected public officials are not just Muslims—they are hardcore Islamists who have cleverly leveraged our democracy against us. Taken advantage of our open societies. Mobilized Muslim voters with a wink and deceived the rest with diversions such as “affordability” and universal healthcare. The ultimate destruction of the democratic, liberal, meritocratic order is mischievously missing from their platforms.

Islam saw a shortcut that was far less bloody and more penetrating into the heart of the Western World. European nations have been stupefyingly willing to swing open their doors and throw down welcome mats that started the clock on the next caliphate.

The Greek army realized it would never be able to scale the massive wall that surrounded Troy. Muslims came to realize that in winning all those wars initiated by Islam, Europe had succeeded in creating a moat that Islam would not be able to cross—unless they were invited in.

Who knew Islam could be this deceptive and ingenious? Europeans are starting to realize that the decline of their countries can partly be blamed on the massive influx of Islamists whose intentions have always been more Greek than continental.

What is to be done to stop the replacement of constitutional democracy with Sharia law? Most importantly, enforce existing criminal and immigration laws that already exist without fear of an “Islamophobia” charge or a ricocheting hate crime. 

Raping white women, beating to death an elderly Holocaust survivor and tossing her off her balcony, and setting fire to another Holocaust survivor can’t be excused because of marijuana use or chalked up to “cultural differences.”

“Grooming gangs,” and the predisposition to violence at the drop of a kufi, are not acceptable behavior in civilized societies. The West should not degrade its civilization simply to appease its Muslim populations.

Allowing public streets to become the setting of freewheeling pogroms, or being turned into neighborhoods where even the police are afraid to patrol, is so incompatible with classical liberalism, an honest conversation must be had with a nation’s Muslim citizens and asylum seekers:

Are you committed to obeying Sharia law over the secular, constitutional law of this land? Do you really want to be here, learn the language, live in harmony with neighbors, and show mutual respect, tolerance, and good citizenship? Embrace religious pluralism, and, in the United States, become a part of the American Experiment?

If not, you don’t really belong here, and you know it. Your heart and loyalty lie elsewhere. More important, you are unwilling to respect the Western way of life and the liberal culture, freedoms, and governance that have enabled the West to prosper since the Enlightenment of the 17th century.

Islam, we are afraid, has consistently been headed in the wrong direction, aiming for a rebirth of the Dark Ages, when caliphates were more common.

We see your Trojan horse for what it is, and we respectfully decline this gift.

On September 11, 2001, the world watched as nineteen men turned commercial airliners into weapons of mass murder. Nearly three thousand people died in the space of a few hours. The perpetrators left no ambiguity: they acted in the name of Islam, citing the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad as they struck what they saw as the heart of unbelief. For a brief, clarifying moment, the mask slipped. The ideology that had animated centuries of conquest, subjugation, and doctrinal absolutism stood exposed in the dust and fire of Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Here was Islam as a political system that commands its followers to fight until the religion of Allah reigns supreme.

Within days, President George W. Bush stood before the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed the sentiment. European leaders followed suit. The message was uniform: the attacks had nothing to do with Islam itself. A tiny fringe of extremists had hijacked a noble religion. True Muslims were victims, too: victims of misunderstanding, of prejudice, of the very terrorists who claimed to speak for them.

The exoneration was not born of ignorance. Intelligence agencies had tracked jihadist networks for years. Scholars of Islamic texts knew the doctrinal foundations of offensive warfare, of abrogation, of the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet fear overrode clarity. There was the immediate terror of backlash: the FBI recorded a seventeen-fold spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, from 28 incidents the previous year to 481. Media outlets amplified every reported slur, every mosque vandalism, every suspicious glance. The narrative solidified: Muslims were now the vulnerable minority in the West, and any criticism of their faith risked igniting pogroms. Geopolitical calculus reinforced the denial. The United States needed allies in the Muslim world for the coming invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt—none could be alienated by the suggestion that their state religion was the problem. Oil flowed. Bases were secured. Coalitions were built on the polite fiction that the enemy was “al-Qaeda,” not the theology that produced it.

So the script was written: terrorism was “radical,” “extremist,” the work of a handful of deviants who had twisted a peaceful faith. The term “Islamist” had not yet been massaged into its modern usage, but the distinction was already being drawn. Islam was innocent. Muslims were innocent. The West owed them not merely tolerance but active protection and accommodation.

The consequences unfolded. Doors that might have been narrowed after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor were instead flung wide open. In the United States, the Muslim population, already growing through the 1990s, accelerated. Pew Research data show roughly 2.35 million Muslims in 2007; by 2015, the figure had climbed to approximately 3.3 million. In Europe the surge was even more dramatic. Between mid-2010 and mid-2016 alone, an estimated 3.7 million Muslims entered the continent, more than half through regular migration channels rather than refugee status. France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, each saw its Muslim population swell by hundreds of thousands in the decade following 9/11. Mosques multiplied. Islamic schools proliferated. Demands for halal food in public institutions, prayer rooms in workplaces, gender-segregated swimming sessions, and exemptions from standard curricula became routine bargaining chips in the politics of “inclusion.”

This was not mere demographic drift. It was reparation dressed as compassion. The West had briefly entertained the uncomfortable thought that Islam might be the issue; having quickly repented of that heresy, it now paid penance through policy. Every new mosque became a monument to atonement. Every accommodation—Sharia councils in Britain, taxpayer-funded Islamic centers in Germany, university prayer spaces in Canada—was presented as proof of moral superiority.

Muslims, sensing the opening, doubled down. The very grievance of being “unfairly accused” after 9/11 became the lever. Innocence declared, they pressed their advantage. Integration was reframed as oppression. Criticism of any Islamic practice was recast as racism. The faith itself was placed beyond scrutiny.

And the attacks kept coming.

Madrid 2004. London 2005. Beslan. Mumbai. Fort Hood. Paris 2015. Brussels. Nice. Manchester. Orlando. San Bernardino. The Bataclan. The Pulse nightclub. The Manchester Arena. The list stretches across continents and decades. Trackers such as the French think tank Fondapol have documented more than 66,000 Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, the overwhelming majority occurring after 9/11, claiming at least a quarter of a million lives. Yet each fresh atrocity triggered the same ritual: swift condemnation of the act, followed by even swifter exculpation of the religion. “This has nothing to do with Islam,” officials repeated like a catechism. “The vast majority of Muslims reject violence.” The perpetrators were always “lone wolves,” “mentally ill,” “radicalized online,” anything but faithful executors of a 1,400-year-old command to fight the unbelievers until they submit.

To sustain the illusion, Western academia and institutions performed a linguistic sleight of hand. They invented “Islamism.” The term, once a neutral descriptor for the political application of Islamic doctrine, was repurposed as a firewall. Islam, we were told, is a beautiful faith of peace and justice. Islamism is the regrettable political distortion practiced by a minority. The distinction allowed policymakers, professors, journalists, and NGOs to defend the faith while condemning its most visible consequences. It shielded the source code—Qur’an, Hadith, Sirah, the doctrine of abrogation, the example of the Prophet—from examination. Question the distinction and you were no longer a critic of terrorism; you were an “Islamophobe,” a bigot, a threat to social cohesion. The very act of noticing the pattern became evidence of prejudice.

By the mid-2010s the inversion was complete. Islam had been granted total immunity. Sixty thousand-plus attacks across more than seventy countries, rivers of blood from Mindanao to Mali to Manhattan, and still the default position in polite society was that Islam bore no responsibility. To suggest otherwise was not merely controversial; it was eccentric, almost indecent. The West had convinced itself that the problem was everywhere except the one place the perpetrators kept naming: the religion itself.

The Perfect Target

October 7, 2023, was the day Islamic terrorism finally hit its perfect target.

Not office workers in New York. Not commuters in London or Madrid. Jews. The one people on earth against whom no justification has ever been required. The one people history itself has already condemned in the eyes of their enemies: they deserved it, just as they “deserved” expulsion from a hundred countries across the centuries. The old blood libel needed no update. It only needed a new stage, and Hamas delivered it in living color, bodycams, livestreams, babies burned in ovens, women paraded naked, elderly Holocaust survivors dragged into tunnels. Barbarism so pure it should have ended every conversation. Instead, it became the moment both Islam and the radical left dropped the mask together.

For twenty-two years the West had clung to the fiction that jihad was the work of “Islamists,” a political perversion, not the faith itself. That firewall had protected Islam from scrutiny after every terrorist attack. But on October 7 the target was Jews, and suddenly neither Muslims nor their new leftist allies could afford the old distinction. They did not want to distance themselves from the slaughter. They wanted to celebrate it. They wanted to own the triumph.

So Muslims claimed Hamas outright. Not as a “radical faction.” Not as “extremists who hijacked the religion.” As Islam. Pure, unadulterated, straight from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example. For the first time since 9/11, the theology was not denied. It was embraced. The chants were not “Not in our name.” They were “From the river to the sea,” “Globalize the intifada,” and open calls for more October 7ths. Imams and influencers who had spent decades parsing “Islam versus Islamism” dropped the parsing. Hamas was not a distortion. Hamas was the faith in action. The mask was not just off; it was thrown away because the victims were Jews and the victory felt too sweet to disown.

The radical left, which had spent the same two decades polishing that same “Islamism” distinction to shield its favorite victim group, did not hesitate either. It claimed Hamas, too. Immediately. Enthusiastically. The very people who had once called bin Laden’s followers “deviants” now marched with the same killers’ flags. Why? Because the target was Jews. Because Israel is not merely a country to them; it is the living symbol of the West, its competence, its resilience, its refusal to apologize for existing. To both ideologies, Israel is the final proof that the old order still breathes: Judeo-Christian roots, Western values, individual dignity, technological triumph grafted onto ancient soil. Smash it, and you smash the West without firing a shot in Manhattan.

So the left supplied the language the Muslims had always lacked in polite society. What Hamas filmed as religious ecstasy, jihad, conquest, humiliation of the infidel, the left translated into “resistance,” “liberation,” “anti-colonialism,” “decolonization.” The rapes became metaphors for “settler violence.” The baby-killings became “context” for 1948. The massacre of festival-goers became “armed struggle against occupation.” Suddenly the oldest hatred on earth had a progressive gloss. Jihad was no longer medieval; it was intersectional.

This was not alliance. It was convergence. Two anti-Western projects, Islam with its fourteen-century mandate of submission, Marxism in all its postmodern, critical, decolonial flavors, had hunted for a common symbol for generations. They found it in the Jews. Demonize Israel and you delegitimize the entire Western project. Legitimize violence against Jews and every other anti-Western grievance becomes instantly righteous.

The proof came fast. Within weeks, Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” the manifesto that had justified 9/11 by blaming U.S. support for Israel, went viral on TikTok, racking up tens of millions of views. Young Westerners who had never read a page of history suddenly declared it “eye-opening.” The murder of three thousand Americans was retroactively reframed not as religious fanaticism but as righteous blowback against “Zionist imperialism.” What al-Qaeda could never achieve in the years after 9/11, mainstream legitimacy, was handed to them on a platter by the very people who had once called the attacks un-Islamic. October 7 did not just justify itself; it reached back in time and justified everything that came before it.

The demonization of Israel never stopped. Israel was not defending itself after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a “genocidal settler-colonial state,” the last outpost of Western empire. Every targeted strike on Hamas infrastructure became “indiscriminate bombing.” Every civilian death, deliberately engineered by Hamas’s human-shield doctrine, was proof of Israeli sadism. The West itself was on trial by association. Support Israel and you support colonialism, capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, every sin on the progressive ledger. Oppose Israel and you stand with the oppressed, even if the “oppressed” are openly calling for your own civilization’s erasure.

In that single inversion, both ideologies won. Islam got its theological victory celebrated in the streets of London and New York without having to hide behind “Islamism.” The radical left got its moral cover to mainstream conquest while pretending it was still fighting “oppressors.” Together they produced the perfect hybrid: jihad with a human-rights vocabulary, medieval barbarism dressed in academic jargon. Hamas’s crimes were not crimes; they were justice. Bin Laden’s massacre of Americans was not fanaticism; it was anti-imperialism. And any defense of Israel, or of the West that still dared to stand behind it, became proof of complicity in original sin.

The streets told the story. Palestinian flags flew beside rainbow banners and Che Guevara icons. Queers for Palestine marched beside people who would throw them from rooftops. Feminists chanted “globalize the intifada” while women in Gaza were still being stoned for “honor.” Marxists who had spent decades denouncing religion suddenly discovered that one particular religion was sacred when it killed Jews. The shared symbol had done its work. Israel had become the hinge on which two dying civilizations could briefly unite to tear down the one that still worked.

What happened after October 7 was not merely the repackaging of Islamic terrorism. It was the mutual legitimization of two irreconcilable projects that hate the West more than they hate each other. By claiming the same enemy, they claimed each other. 

The Betrayal from Within

October 7 did not just expose the Red-Green alliance. It pulled in a third, far more dangerous partner: segments of the American right who call themselves patriots, America Firsters, realists, and defenders of Western civilization. These were not the usual suspects from the campus left or the Muslim diaspora. These were voices that had once stood against cultural surrender. And yet, when the moment came, many of them did exactly what their enemies hoped they would: they joined the chorus demonizing Israel, laundering jihad as “blowback,” and treating the Jewish state as the root of every American problem. How does a man who claims to love his country end up carrying water for the very forces that want to bury it?

They are useful idiots in the classic Leninist sense, except this time they wear MAGA hats and quote the Constitution. Some did it out of cowardice. Some out of something uglier. Some out of genuine delusion. And some because the money was too good. Each group reveals a different fracture in the right’s soul, and together they show how even those who swear they are defending the West can become the instruments of its undoing.

The largest contingent, and the most disappointing, were the cowards who once professed love for Israel. These were the people who had cheered the Abraham Accords, who had mocked the left’s obsession with “Zionist influence,” who had correctly identified radical Islam as the civilizational threat of our time. After October 7 they watched the propaganda machine go into overdrive: campus encampments, TikTok floods, legacy media footage of Gazan children framed as victims while Israeli children lay in morgues. Suddenly “pro-Israel” became a political liability. The polls shifted. The donor class wavered. The online right began calling anyone who defended Israel a “neocon” or a “dual citizen.” And these men folded. They did not deny the massacre, they simply stopped talking about it. They pivoted to “What about Gaza?” They discovered a sudden interest in “civilian casualties” they had never shown when Muslims slaughtered Christians in Nigeria or Yazidis in Iraq.

They told themselves they were being “consistent” or “anti-interventionist.” What they were really doing was dropping the one frontline state that still fights the enemy on its own soil. They failed to understand that Israel is not a favor the West does for Jews. Israel is the West’s proof of concept: a nation rebuilt from exile, armed with the Western values that Jerusalem gifted the world, and unapologetic self-defense. Abandon Israel in the face of this assault and you are not saving American blood or treasure. You are signaling to every jihadi and every decolonial theorist that the West no longer has the will to defend its own principles. You are handing the enemy the moral high ground they could never seize on their own.

Others needed no conversion. They had been waiting for this moment their entire lives. The old anti-Semitism, never fully extinguished on the fringes of the right, finally found respectable cover. For decades it had been socially radioactive to say the quiet part out loud. Now the left had made hatred of Israel the central moral cause of the age. Suddenly the same tropes that had once been confined to 4chan comment sections were being mainstreamed by Ivy League professors and CNN anchors: “Zionist lobby,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “dual loyalty.” The anti-Semites on the right did not have to invent new language. They simply borrowed the left’s. They could now post memes about “Zionist Occupied Government” and be retweeted by millions who thought they were merely criticizing “forever wars.” October 7 gave them the perfect alibi. They were not bigots; they were “anti-Zionists” fighting the same empire the progressives were fighting. The fact that their new allies would happily throw them into the same ditch once the Jews were gone never seemed to register. Hatred is a powerful solvent. It dissolves principle faster than any ideology.

A smaller but vocal group genuinely believed the propaganda. These were the sincere realists, the paleo-conservatives, the libertarians who had spent years warning against neoconservative overreach. They watched the same footage the rest of us did, but they swallowed the narrative whole. Hamas’s atrocities became “resistance.” Israel’s response became “genocide.” They convinced themselves that if America simply cut off support for Israel, the jihad would evaporate and the Muslim world would suddenly become a partner in peace. They ignored fourteen centuries of doctrine. They ignored the Muslim Brotherhood’s own words. They ignored what every former Muslim from the Middle East has been screaming for years. Instead, they listened to Dave Smith explaining that the attack was “predictable” or Tucker Carlson wondering why we care so much about a country “the size of New Jersey.” They believed the Muslims when the Muslims told them the problem was Israel. They believed the leftists when the leftists told them the problem was “colonialism.” They flipped because they mistook tactical grievance for strategic truth. In doing so they became the perfect marks: patriots who thought they were saving America by betraying its strongest ally in the only theater where the enemy is already engaged.

Then there are the ones who were never sincere to begin with. The paid actors. Qatar, Turkey, and their Gulf proxies have spent billions building influence networks inside the American right. Think tanks quietly funded, influencers on retainer, podcasts with suspiciously large sponsorships. Some of these voices suddenly discovered a deep concern for Palestinian children right around the time their bank accounts got fatter. The money does not buy outright lies; it buys selective blindness. It buys the decision to platform certain guests, to soft-pedal certain doctrines, to treat Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than a death cult. Foreign funding has always been the quiet corruption of American discourse. After October 7 it simply found a new cause célèbre.

Finally, the most human and most tragic category: those who have nice Muslim friends. They know Ahmed from the gym, Fatima from the PTA, the friendly imam down the street who always smiles and talks about “peace.” These people cannot square the images of October 7 with the pleasant, assimilated Muslims in their daily lives. So they perform the mental gymnastics required: “My Muslims are different. This is just politics. This is not real Islam.” They have never read the Qur’an. They have never sat through a Friday sermon in Arabic. They have never asked their nice Muslim friends what they really think about apostates, about Jews, about the caliphate. Personal experience becomes the ultimate authority, and the doctrine is dismissed as “extremist.”

All of them, cowards, anti-Semites, true believers, paid voices, and the willfully naïve, share one fatal misunderstanding. They think the war is about Israel. It is not. Israel is the symbol, not the cause. The real war is between two competing projects, Islam’s total submission and the radical left’s total deconstruction, against the last remnants of the West that still refuses to kneel.

The Re-Zionization of the West

Zionism began in the late nineteenth century as a desperate Jewish political project: a movement of exiles who had been hunted across continents, stripped of their land, their dignity, their right to exist as a people. Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists were not dreaming of empire or supremacy. They were trying to survive. They wanted one small patch of earth where Jews could finally stop running, stop apologizing, stop dying for the crime of being Jewish. A nation-state. A refuge. A place to plant vineyards, build hospitals, and raise children who would not have to hide their names or their prayers.

That project succeeded beyond anything Herzl could have imagined. Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, from pogroms and expulsions, from the centuries of dhimmitude under Islamic rule. It became a miracle of resilience: a democracy in a sea of theocracies, a technological powerhouse in a desert of failed states, a people who turned swamps into cities and turned “never again” into actual policy. But somewhere along the way, Zionism outgrew its original skin. It stopped being merely a Jewish national movement and became something far larger, far more universal.

It became the Western civilization project itself.

Because what Israel defends on the front lines of the Middle East is not just Jewish land. It is the last unapologetic outpost of everything the West once claimed to believe in: the sovereignty of the individual, the rule of law rooted in Judeo-Christian morality, the right to defend yourself without begging permission from the international community, the refusal to submit to tribal theocracy or postmodern relativism. Israel does not apologize for its borders. It does not apologize for its strength. It does not pretend that every culture is equally equipped to build free societies. It simply exists, thrives, and wins, under the most hostile conditions imaginable. In doing so, it proves that the West’s ideas are not historical accidents. They are superior. They work. Even when surrounded by enemies who want to erase them.

This is why the alliance we have watched form since October 7 hates Israel with such primal intensity. It is not about settlements or checkpoints or the size of the country. It never was. Islam sees in Israel the theological insult of a dhimmi people who refused to stay dhimmi. The radical left sees in Israel the living rebuke to its entire worldview: a nation that rejects victimhood, rejects deconstruction, rejects the idea that history is nothing but a chain of oppressions. Both projects, Islam’s total submission and Marxism’s total dismantling, require the West to kneel. Israel refuses. And because it refuses in full view of the world, it has become the symbol of everything the West must still be if it wants to survive.

That is the re-Zionization of the West.

It is not about ethnicity. It is not about converting Christians or secularists into Jews. It is about rediscovering the unapologetic civilizational confidence that Zionism now embodies. The West was once Zionist in spirit long before the word existed. It was the civilization that believed that borders mattered, that strength was not a sin, that history could be bent toward justice instead of endless grievance. It was the civilization that was not ashamed of excellence. Israel is that same root system transplanted into hostile soil and still bearing fruit. To defend Israel today is to defend the West’s own possibility of renewal.

Look at what the enemies are really attacking when they attack “Zionism.” They are attacking the idea that a nation can prioritize its own citizens without being called supremacist. They are attacking the idea that some values, liberty, truth, self-defense, are worth dying for and not everything is negotiable. Islam demands submission; the left demands deconstruction. Israel says no to both. It is the living proof that the West can still say no.

The re-Zionization of the West is therefore not military or territorial. It is moral and civilizational. It means stopping the endless apologies. It means recognizing that not every migrant is a future citizen, that not every culture is compatible with open societies, that not every grievance is sacred. It means understanding that Israel’s fight against Hamas is not a “regional conflict” but the West’s fight against the same forces that are already inside Western cities, inside its universities, its governments, its streets.

Re-Zionization of the West is the recognition that the war is not about land in the Middle East. It is about the soul of the West itself. Israel is not asking the West to save it. Israel is showing the West what it must become again if it wants to save itself: clear-eyed, unashamed, willing to name the enemy and willing to defeat it. It is showing that a civilization can be both particular, rooted in its own history and people, and universal in its defense of the ideas that made it great.

A version of this article was originally published by the Ideological Defense Institute. Used with permission.

The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

On the surface of it, this is a fairly straightforward formulation barring the legislative branch from taking any action to create a state religion (the Constitution specifically bans religious texts for public office) or barring the practice of any religion, and yet history provides a more complex context that raises significant questions about the legality of Islam in America.

The Founders were English citizens and well aware of the way in which religion could stoke political violence. In the late eighteenth century, Oliver Cromwell was not ancient history, neither were the Scots Covenanters or the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. While they did not anticipate the rise of an Islamic insurgency in America, they understood quite well that religion and violence could and would intersect. That was one of the reasons for barring a state church, to avoid giving the government control over religion, a situation that had resulted in much of the religious violence in England. By giving religion independence, but not political power, the First Amendment sought to avoid a repeat of the same ugliness that had marked centuries of wars in Europe.

The separation of church and state was meant to protect the integrity of both, and avoid power struggles between religious groups. There was to be no state religion: the government could not leverage religious authority and religious factions could not begin civil wars in a struggle to gain power or autonomy. For the most part, it worked until mass migration changed America.

What they had not been anticipating was that the religious conflict in America would not come from European-style clashes between Christians or over Christianity, but from an entirely different religion that made the acquisition of political power by any means its central mission on earth.

Until now, the only real acid test for this approach involved the Mormon Church, an ugly history on both sides that has mostly been buried under the weight of time. More recently, Scientology flared up as a cult turned church that demanded its own autonomy and did its best to make war on the government and its critics.

And then there is Islam. The first problem with using the First Amendment in defense of Islam is that its goal is to violate the First Amendment. Islam’s widely stated goal is to become a state religion, around the world and in America as well.

Sharia has been making steady advances in Africa and parts of Asia. Majorities of Muslims in the U.K. have said that they want Sharia law, and leading British figures such as the Archbishop of Canterbury have supported the introduction of Islamic law into the British legal system. Domestic advocates for Sharia are pushing for the normalization of Sharia law in the United States as well. 

This would, in effect, turn Islam into an established religion in the United States, itself a violation of the First Amendment. Furthermore, Islam abridges the remaining portions of the First Amendment, which protect freedom of speech and the press. Islam rejects both of these. To protect “Islamic rights,” therefore, means depriving non-Muslims of freedom of religion—and both Muslims and non-Muslims of freedom of speech and the press.

These are not hypothetical scenarios: the Muhammad cartoon controversies and their resulting slaughters and attacks demonstrated exactly how this will work. So did the persecution of Salman Rushdie. To accept Islam is to reject freedom of speech and religion, in the same way that accepting communism meant rejecting freedom of speech and religion. Islam and the Constitution of the United States are incompatible in the same way that communism and the Constitution are incompatible because they are founded on the rejection of any kind of coexistence or dissent.

The Founders sought to protect religious freedoms; at no point in time did they seek to protect religious terrorism. And Supreme Court justices throughout American history have found that the First Amendment does not provide license for significant lawbreaking. That is why polygamy is not legal in the United States. Having to choose between religious freedom and the rights and dignity of women and children, America correctly chose the latter.

In 1785, James Madison, father of the Constitution, wrote, “We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion or the duty which we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”

Yet Islamic history and recent events in Eurabia demonstrate that Islam does indeed spread by force and violence. Upholding the right of Islam to force its statutes and views on Americans violates Madison’s fundamental and undeniable truth.

In 1802, Jefferson wrote his explanation for the First Amendment to the Danbury Baptist Association: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, and that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that the legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

There is a key phrase in this statement, which is that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions. This statement was used as a legal principle by the Supreme Court in 1878 in the case of Reynolds v. United States. Reynolds, a Mormon, had been charged with bigamy and claimed that his faith required him to engage in polygamy. The Court found that, while Reynolds had the right to believe that polygamy was his duty, he did not have the right to practice it—thus upholding Jefferson’s distinction between action and belief.

As the court put it:

In our opinion, the statute immediately under consideration is within the legislative power of Congress. It is constitutional and valid as prescribing a rule of action for all those residing in the Territories, and in places over which the United States have exclusive control. This being so, the only question which remains is, whether those who make polygamy a part of their religion are excepted from the operation of the statute. If they are, then those who do not make polygamy a part of their religious belief may be found guilty and punished, while those who do, must be acquitted and go free. This would be introducing a new element into criminal law.

Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?

So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? [98 U.S. 145, 167] To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.

The outcome then was that we could not have a situation in which crimes could be committed in the name of religion and protected by the First Amendment. Belief could not be criminalized, but practice could be.

We can begin by pointing out that any number of Islamic practices which violate American law or promote an unhealthy social consequence can be banned, for much the same reason that polygamy was. In Reynolds v. United States, the Court upheld the right of the Utah legislature to brand the spread of polygamy as a threat to innocent women and children that had to be arrested through strong measures.

The spread of Islam’s practices can be seen in the same way.

France has treated the hijab in a similar way. The United States can, too, if it finds any abuse or violence associated with its enforcement or use. Honor killings over the hijab demonstrate that this is the case; state legislatures, then, can move to ban the hijab given that Muslim women defying its forced ubiquity face murder.

Thus, while we cannot charge someone with believing in Islam, we can stamp out many Islamic practices that are dangerous or abusive. The First Amendment does not protect religious practices that are illegal or made illegal; it protects only the beliefs themselves.

But what does that actually mean and how exactly do we distinguish between action and practice? Does it merely mean that it is legal to believe in seizing America in the name of Islam, but not to practice it?

We can go much further at an organizational level, based on the Sedition Act of 1918 and the 1954 Communist Control Act , which give us some guidelines for cracking down on militant organizations seeking to overthrow America:

Sec. 2. The Congress hereby finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Unlike political parties, which evolve their policies and programs through public means, by the reconciliation of a wide variety of individual views, and submit those policies and programs to the electorate at large for approval or disapproval, the policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders of the world Communist movement. Its members have no part in determining its goals, and are not permitted to voice dissent to party objectives.

This applies to Islam just as much as it applies to communism. And this preamble was part of a passage demonstrating the fundamental distinction between communism and legitimate political parties.

The assumption of the Communist Control Act was that the First Amendment did not apply to the Communist Party or to communist-controlled parties, because they did not fit the democratic template of the First Amendment. As such the Communist Party was not a legitimate party, but an overseas directed conspiracy to overthrow the United States and replace it with a communist system.

Not only can this same argument also apply to Islamic organizations such as CAIR, but Islam can be distinguished from other religions on similar grounds. The following phrase from the original document represents the key point here:

It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

And that is the core of the problem. While we cannot criminalize individual beliefs alone, we can criminalize organizations dedicated to overthrowing the United States and replacing it with a totalitarian system. An organization is not merely “belief”—it also represents an attempt to put those beliefs into practice.

The Internal Security Act of 1950, along with the 1954 Communist Control Act provides extensive legal grounds for criminalizing organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the United States, as well as membership in such organizations—and even provides for the removal of citizenship from members of such organizations.

While succeeding courts have thrown out many portions of these laws, had the United States truly gotten serious about the War on Terror, it could have passed a real Patriot Act that would have clamped down on Islamist organizations in a similar way.

The bill could have easily retrofitted some of the language of the Communist Control Act as follows:

Sec. 3. Islamic organizations, regardless of their assumed name, whose object or purpose is to overthrow the Government of the United States, or the government of any State, Territory, District, or possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein by force and violence, are not entitled to any of the rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies created under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof; and whatever rights, privileges, and immunities which have heretofore been granted to said party or any subsidiary organization by reason of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof, are hereby terminated…

Sec. 4. Whoever knowingly and willfully becomes or remains a member of such organizations, or (2) any other organization having for one of its purposes or objectives the establishment, control conduct, seizure, or overthrow of the Government of the United States, or the government of any State or political subdivision thereof, by the use of force or violence, with knowledge of the purpose or objective of such organization shall be subject to all the provisions and penalties of the Internal Security Act of 1950.

The question then becomes one of defining what exactly an Islamist organization is. If we define Islamist under the same guidelines as communist, but specifically modified as representing a belief in the overthrow or takeover of the United States or any part of it, thereby placing the United States under Islamic law, we already have a very broad net with which to work.

Or, to simply quote the Internal Security Act again:

Sec. 4. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree, with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship.

Since Islam represents a totalitarian dictatorship, any organization or individual seeking to establish Islamic law or Sharia within the United States can be held liable and charged over its violation. This would apply to both Muslims and non-Muslims.

And the Qur’an itself represents a volume whose contents both implicitly and explicitly call for the violent overthrow of the United States.

Consider chapter 9 of the Qur’an, which governs the interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims. Particularly 9:29: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.”

There are numerous other verses in the Qur’an which similarly call for Muslims to subjugate non-Muslims and take power. This parallels the charge against the Communist Party and places Muslims who believe in the Qur’an on the same level as communists who believe in the overthrow of the United States.

Participation in any Muslim organization therefore becomes the equivalent of participating in a communist organization—and can be banned.

While the First Amendment does not permit a ban on any specific religion, this is limited to religious belief, not religious practice. And the laws enacted against communism in the 1950s demonstrate that organizations aimed at the overthrow of the United States can be banned and membership in them can even be criminalized.

We can ban Islam from the public sphere, ban Islamic organizations as criminal organizations, criminalize Islamic practices, and even denaturalize and deport Muslims who are United States citizens. The legal infrastructure is there. Despite the fact that the United States is far more protective of political and religious rights, every single Islamic organization can be shut down within a decade, from the national to the mosque level—and those who believe in the Islamic mandate of jihad to Islamize the world in general and the United States specifically can be deported. Theoretically, those Muslims who claim they reject the Qur’anic commandment of conflict and supremacism would have nothing to fear, allowing for the emergence of the “moderate Islam” about which we have heard much in word, but has failed to come into being in deed and practice. And if, of course, they are lying, as Islam allows, then they can and must leave, too.

The legal infrastructure is there. Despite the fact that the United States is far more protective of political and religious rights, within a decade every single Islamic organization, from the national to the mosque level, can be shut down—and the majority of its members and participants can be deported from the United States regardless of whether they are citizens or not.

We can do it. Whether we will do it is another matter. It would require rolling back a number of Supreme Court decisions, but it was briefly possible post-9/11.

It may yet become possible again.

A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s blog. Reproduced with permission.

The United States was founded, as John Adams put it, “not as a Christian nation, but as a nation of Christians,” and a surprising number of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were trained ministers. I like to think of the Constitution as a libertarian document, but classical liberalism is an Enlightenment concept, and the Enlightenment is a direct descendent of the Christian world, where Judeo-Christian morality collided with Greek philosophy.

That is not to say the Constitution is only for Christians. 

There is this strange thought today that the West is too Eurocentric, but, while certainly European countries have uniquely European cultures, healthy cultures borrow from one another, and the central tenet that undergirds classical liberalism—that each person should be free to live their lives however they wish provided they allow others to do the same—makes just as much sense outside the West as do tacos or pizza. Nor is the Judeo-Christian moral order European. It originally comes from the Middle East.

The founding generation did not only include Christians. It also included theists, rationalists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Pennsylvania Quakers had little in common with the slaveholding Baptist planters of South Carolina, or the Anglican gentry of Virginia. Every colony, and every region within those colonies, carried its own customs, its own economic realities, and its own religious views. Culture varied from place to place.

What held these communities together was the revolutionary idea that people should be equal under the law, and should be free to live their lives as they see fit provided they allow others to do the same. That principle—ordered liberty—was the only thing strong enough to bind a people who otherwise had every reason to separate.

And they did separate. The original 13 colonies came together to fight for independence, but as 13 nations. The first attempt at post-British rule was not the Constitution we use today, but the Articles of Confederation of 1781, which created not something that resembled a nation of states so much as a collection of independent nations with a common enemy. This confederation looked more like NATO than a unified country, each nation with its own currency, its own trade policies, its own legislature, and most of its own powers. 

Congress under the Articles could request money and coordinate defense, but it lacked the authority to tax, regulate, or raise a permanent army, leaving the confederation weak and vulnerable to both internal disorder and external threats. As the states began to bicker, there was fear that some of them might even go to war with one another, giving the 13 nations under the Confederation every reason to form “a more perfect Union.”

The Constitutional Convention defined a federal system with just enough central authority to secure liberty and commerce across borders, while preserving each states’ distinct character. This balance is what made the American experiment possible.

The founders knew slavery contradicted the claim that all men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence not only specified this, but it blamed the King of England for the slave trade. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner when he wrote the Declaration, but he was also an abolitionist who wanted to tell the King, “We seem stuck with this abhorrent practice and it is all your fault.” (George III ironically completely agreed with Jefferson, and had nothing but the most haughty contempt for the enslavement of Africans.) What the founders lacked was the political will to end slavery at the national level. They compromised by leaving it to the states.

When we pretend the sins of the founding era were national sins rather than the sins of specific states, or when we pretend that our ancestors’ failure to live up to their own ideals renders those ideals guilty, we trade a more perfect union for what would become a very different union, in which the state no longer referees disputes, but instead manages the public. In that union, the right to live as one wants is gone.

Human beings have always wanted liberty for themselves. The desire to be free is universal; the willingness to extend that freedom to others is not. This is because we desire more than mere freedom; we desire the divine right of kings, and, in that respect, many modern Americans are no better than the slaveholders of two centuries ago. We just updated the chains.

If we are honest about human nature, it is not about freedom so much as control. We all want to be in control of ourselves, but we also want control over other people. Personal liberty is not a goal so much as a compromise in which we all say, “I will not try to control you, and in return you will not try to control me.” Slavery conflicts with that compromise.

Slavery was not an American invention either, nor even a Western one. It has been a near-constant part of human history, across every continent, up until the last 200 years. Nobody gave it a second thought when it was the norm, and a child born today, raised in ancient Rome would grow up a Roman. If placed in a wealthy household, this child would likely own slaves—mostly from places like what we now call Spain, France, or Britain. The word “slave” derives from “Slav,” and for centuries the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe supplied a large share of the human chattel in the Islamic world.

It is en vogue today to claim that it was the Islamic countries that first recognized the independence of the United States, but the truth is that Britain paid tribute to the Barbary nations of Northern Africa so that the Barbary pirates would leave British ships alone. When we became an independent nation, the Barbary pirates began attacking American ships and taking American crews into slavery. When we sent envoys to ask why, we were told that we were no longer covered by British tributes, and that the Qur’an demands that Muslims enslave anyone who is not Islamic unless they pay the jizyah. We were told to either pay tribute as a form of jizyah, or to watch our ships getting seized and their crews becoming slaves, for all time to come.

Thomas Jefferson responded by sending the United States Marine Corps, whose hymn starts with “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” based on Tripoli being one of the capitals of the Barbary states. Our very first war as an independent nation was against the Islamic states of North Africa, and it was fought against slavery.

What changed in the modern era was not that everyone around the world suddenly saw slavery as morally wrong. What changed was that one civilization—the West—was so moved by the words of Thomas Jefferson—that “all men are created equal”—to be moved to end slavery. Also, the Industrial Revolution—the age of steam and machinery—revealed that having inanimate objects do the most strenuous of work was much more profitable and efficient than keeping armies of strong, dangerous men in terrible conditions and with no reward for their labor. England, in particular, ended slavery. First England ended it throughout its empire, and then it used its vast empire to stomp out slavery around the world.

Black slaves in the Americas were not the last people freed from bondage; they were among the first. Arab and Ottoman slave trading continued long after the trans-Atlantic trade ended, and it included both black Africans and white Europeans. The Barbary corsairs alone captured and enslaved an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, raiding as far as Iceland and the coasts of Ireland. We treat slavery as something that separates us but we all have slaves in our ancestry. We differ only in how far back we have to go to find them.

Islam is a religion, but it is also a political and legal system, with the Qur’an as a kind of theocratic constitution. Its core texts contain explicit commands both to submit personally to Allah through Sharia, and to bring others under that submission, by persuasion where possible and by force where necessary.

A faith that asks its followers to wear a burka can coexist with liberty, but a faith that commands its followers to ensure that others wear the burka cannot coexist. The Islamic parallel to ordered liberty is to live according to Sharia, and to force others to do the same.

The Qur’an contains verses such as 9:29, which directs believers to fight those who have received the Scripture yet do not believe in the full truth of Islam “until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” Historical practice codified this into the dhimmi system: non-Muslims could retain limited rights to life, property, and private worship in exchange for a special poll tax, restrictions on bearing arms, limits on building or repairing houses of worship, distinctive clothing or markings, and prohibitions against criticizing Islam. 

The Barbary slave trade was part of a much larger system that persisted in parts of the Muslim world well into the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962—at the behest of the Kennedy administration. Mauritania banned it in 1961—then 1980 and 1981, then criminalized it in 2007, and again in 2015 (after the French banned it in 1901, and then again in 1905). Slavery is now making a comeback under Islam, with active slave trading everywhere ISIS has ruled, including Libya today.

As with all faiths, true believers are apt to read the religious doctrine and to act it out in their daily lives. A national leader who says “Don’t do that” is to the true adherents of Islam an apostate, the penalty for which is death. Groups like ISIS and al-Qa‘idah are not extreme because they move away from Islamic doctrine into something else, but because they are the most pure examples of Islam currently in practice.

In many Muslim-majority countries, apostasy remains punishable by death or imprisonment. Blasphemy laws are enforced. In Europe, many Muslims have formed no-go zones where the police only go in force, causing riots. Such behavior flows from a theology that treats the separation of mosque and state as a temporary concession rather than a permanent principle, and that views classical liberalism as a weakness to be exploited until conquest is possible.

Personal freedom is incompatible with a religion based on forced submission, and though millions and millions of Muslims worldwide practice Islam as a personal set of beliefs, they have to ignore much of their central doctrine to do so. They are also apostates to the true adherent. Apostasy being a crime punishable by death in Islam, this is a religion that bends toward—not away from—extremism.

Islam can, in fact, be more extreme in the West than in traditional Islamic lands. Saudi Arabia had to ban British Muslims from traveling to Saudi Arabia out of the fear that British Muslims would radicalize the Saudi people towards the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes the decadent, U.S.-aligned Saudi monarchy insufficiently Islamic.

Western societies cannot survive if they refuse to apply their own founding principles to Islam. A liberty framework that tolerates every private belief but draws the line at beliefs that require the coercion of others is not bigotry; it is the minimal condition of ordered freedom. 

The problem the West has is not really Islam. It is that we cannot enforce the liberty principle on others if we will not enforce it on ourselves. The West increasingly treats liberty as permission granted by institutions rather than as the natural condition of the individual. People are still told they are free, but that freedom is narrowed by administrative rules, speech codes, licensing regimes, mandates, surveillance, and an expanding belief that government has a legitimate role in managing private choices for the sake of collective outcomes. 

The old principle was that adults should be free to live as they choose so long as they do not violate the equal rights of others. The emerging principle is that people may live as they choose only so long as their choices conform to priorities established by political, bureaucratic, corporate, and cultural authorities, and a free people which does not believe in freedom is ripe for capture by any people with a coherent belief system. Islam has one; it might not be the one we want, but it does exist.

Restoring ordered liberty means rejecting the notion that any group’s religious or cultural demands entitle it to exemptions from the non-aggression rule. It also means treating jihadist ideology and Sharia supremacism as the civilizational threats they are, not as protected cultural expressions. 

It also means recognizing that the same human impulse that once justified chattel slavery—the desire to control others—has found new language and new justifications in the contemporary world of the West. We must learn once again to reject those impulses in ourselves, so that we can also reject them in other people.

Technology has changed what modern societies look like, letting us live with material abundance and capabilities that would have seemed miraculous even 50 years ago. That abundance did not come from reducing liberty, or from pretending that all moral systems are the same. Gratitude for our relative abundance means defending the conditions that produced it. Those conditions include refusing to accommodate any ideology, religious or otherwise, that treats the right to live free as something to destroy. 

The American founding was imperfect, as every founding is. Our central idea that each person should be free to live their life however they see fit as long as they let others do the same remains the only workable basis for a free and plural society, and Islam rejects ordered liberty at its root. A nation with religious freedom cannot ban Islam, but it can ban the things Islam does whenever those things violate the rights of others, and it can enforce those laws with zeal.

Mankind cannot change, but people can, both individually, and collectively. What we cannot do is to change generationally unless each subsequent generation teaches the one that comes after, and if the West is going to survive, it needs to give its children a crash-course on classical liberalism and ordered liberty today. 

We were founded as a nation of Christians. We do not have to remain one, but we do have to keep the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the Western world. The alternative is tyranny. The question is whether that be a tyranny of the hijab, or one protecting us from it.

How two decades changed my views on Islam, Muslims, and the West

Young people are often dismissed as naïve because they cling to the hope that if enough people simply believe in peace, sit down together, share meals, and talk across differences, the world will improve. I once held that hope with real conviction. At 41, I still see value in conversation and cooperation. Yet experience has taught me that optimism without real-world knowledge can become a liability. 

For more than two decades, the subject of that optimism for me was Islam. My journey from idealistic engagement to harder clarity has been neither simple nor comfortable, as I explain in this piece.

Post-9/11 Beginnings + the Search for Common Ground

I came of age as a post-9/11 teenager, in a climate thick with anxiety about terrorism and suspicion toward Muslims. As an undergraduate student at American University in Washington, D.C., I sought out Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, the former Pakistani high commissioner to the United Kingdom and a prominent Islamic anthropologist dedicated to presenting Islam in ways Western audiences could largely accept. I admired his commitment to interfaith dialogue and the possibility that such work might serve as an antidote to the armed conflict then unfolding in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After returning from London following the completion of my master’s degree, I joined Ambassador Ahmed on the Journey into America project, visiting dozens of mosques across the U.S. in an effort to understand American identity through the lens of Muslims and locate shared ground between the West and Islam. Ambassador Ahmed championed the pluralist vision of the American Founders—religious freedom and equality under the law. I embraced those principles then and still do. 

After more than 20 years of study, travel, and relationships with Muslim Americans and Muslims abroad, however, my understanding has grown considerably more layered. I no longer claim that supporting Islam is my duty as a U.S. citizen, or believe that every criticism of Muslim communities or Islamic doctrine equals “Islamophobia.”

Rethinking Islamic Concepts + the Limits of Soft Interpretations

Between 2005 to 2022, I positioned myself as a public defender of Islam. In books, op-eds, lectures, interviews, and classroom discussions, I worked to separate the faith from the violence committed in its name, insisting that the real danger lay in the hearts and minds of Westerners rather than in any doctrinal or cultural patterns among Muslims themselves. I repeatedly explained and argued that any apparent contradiction could be resolved through progressive theological interpretations or better interfaith dialogue. Looking back at these previous endeavors I had used a rubber shield—flexible, well-intentioned protection against charges of Islamophobia—which gradually hardened into a blindfold. It spared me (for a time) from uncomfortable data. It also prevented me from seeing the ideology that kept producing new pawns. 

A dense fog of good intentions and academic orthodoxy surrounding Islamic concepts kept me blinded from the truth. In the 2010s I defended Muslims even when the evidence did not warrant it, and, in the process, I shifted attention away from the victims of Islam-inspired terrorism and softened the role of Islamic ideologies that motivated the killers. I routinely responded to Islamist terrorist attacks by warning that alarmist Western reactions would only fuel Islamophobia. I rejected the charge of taqiyah—the claim that Muslims are permitted to deceive outsiders to advance communal goals—seeing it as a tool for those promoting Islamophobia. For over a decade, I asserted that “jihad” means only an inner spiritual struggle. While jihad can indeed carry that meaning, many Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere understand it as a drive to reshape the surrounding society according to Islamic norms, or, in its more extreme form, as armed conflict. With that said, I continue to respect the hadith that ranks the greater jihad as the battle against one’s own ego and the lesser as physical fighting. What troubles me is how frequently the lesser version appears to dominate in practice.

Much of my earlier outlook was shaped by Western academia and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—circles I no longer claim as my own. Within the hierarchy of identity politics in both realms, Muslims occupied a privileged place near the top—they were to be treated with special solicitude because they were labeled “oppressed.” I no longer accept that ranking either. 

The progressive academic environment that shaped my early thinking actively planted the seeds for Islamist influence. Cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and the broader social justice framework watered those seeds by teaching a generation of students to view every disparity through the singular lens of “oppressor” versus “oppressed,” with Muslims in the bracket of the latter. In that binary, Western civilization, the U.S., and Israel were permanently cast as the villains, while Muslims and Palestinians in particular were granted automatic moral priority. This intellectual architecture supplied Islamist activists with ready-made allies and linguistic cover. Student groups and professors backed them by invoking “de-colonization,” “resistance,” and “equity” while advancing agendas that, in practice, rejected the very liberal order that made the university possible in the first place. The result was that progressive orthodoxy expanded the space for Islamist narratives while shrinking the space for dissent in academia and civil society. I watched this dynamic unfold in real time—first as a participant who internalized the hierarchy of the “oppressed,” and then later as a target when I stepped outside it. 

From Celebrated Bridge-Building to Crossing the Red Line

For more than a decade, I walked a carefully constructed tightrope. I was celebrated on one side as a Christian bridge-builder who humanized Islam, while the other side remained mostly silent—so long as I never stepped too far away from certain political realities. The moment I did, the rope snapped. This dynamic peaked in 2020 with the publication of my book The Humanity of Muhammad: A Christian View. Favorable treatments of Muhammad and consistent advocacy for constructive Islamic messaging earned me goodwill. Yet those same portrayals provoked resistance from those who saw them as dilutions of the faith designed to appeal to Western sensibilities. These critics showed little interest in locating genuine common ground between U.S. civic values and the priorities of the Ummah. Around this time I also remained broadly “pro-Palestinian” and treated Islamist terrorist organizations as fringe outliers within the ummah. I now see that I functioned as a useful puppet. My positive messaging formed part of a broader strategy to improve Islam’s public image. More tensions surfaced the moment I raised political questions about Palestinians. Pressure then followed to stay within the accepted “party line”—criticize and denounce Israel and its allies. I eventually learned that the non-negotiable boundary was Zionism. Once I crossed it, the relationships changed permanently.

Opposition intensified because of my academic visits to the United Arab Emirates. Critics who rejected interfaith efforts accused the Emiratis of inventing a hybrid “Abrahamism” that blended Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into something new and illegitimate. That criticism increased when I publicly supported the Abraham Accords. Opponents framed the agreements as a betrayal of the Palestinians—an abandonment of the long-standing Arab insistence on linkage between normalization with Israel and progress towards Palestinian statehood. In retrospect, the goodwill I had earned among Muslims was never unconditional. The moment my foot landed on that forbidden ground of Zionism, the rope was cut. Bridge-building, it turned out, had always been conditional. 

October 7 + the Price of Clarity

The decisive break came after October 7, 2023. When I publicly stated my support for Israel and Zionism, a wave of cancellation followed online and offline. I lost roughly 80,000 Instagram followers and 30,000 followers on X. Some of those accounts may have been automated, but the message was unmistakable—support for Jews, Israelis, and Zionists was no longer tolerable. Even self-described moderate Muslims stepped away, and some labeled me Islamophobic simply for criticizing Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, equipped with its well-documented and organized presence in the U.S. and the West at large.

At Rice University, where I have served as a faculty member since 2015, my advocacy for Zionism has produced years of difficulty. I cannot detail every incident without risking further professional harm. The result is a form of self-censorship undertaken to shield a faith (Islam) or a movement (the third intifadah) that are not even my own. In today’s academy, open criticism of Islamist networks combined with support for Israel can become grounds for isolation or worse—removal. 

My decision to stand with Israel was never merely emotional, tribal, or for professional purposes. The truth is that it was my recognition that the U.S.-Israel alliance is a strategic pillar of Western civilization itself. Israel remains the only democracy in the Middle East. The security partnership between the two countries delivers concrete benefits to Americans with joint development in missile-defense systems and sharing intelligence. Beyond the bilateral relationship, Israel functions as a barrier against the westward expansion of Islamist influence, which has already made its way onto the European continent. The survival or collapse of the alliance would send a signal far beyond the Middle East about the resolve of free societies. 

When progressive and Islamist voices demand that the U.S.-Israel alliance be broken, they are not merely criticizing a foreign policy preference. Instead, they are attacking one of the pillars safeguarding the entire democratic and liberal Western order. For me, crossing the Zionism red line of the leftist-Islamist alliance meant refusing to participate in the “soft war” campaign against the West. The personal cost was high, but the alternative—remaining silent while a democratic ally was delegitimized and attacked—would have been a betrayal of the very Enlightenment principles I claim to defend.

Networks, Frameworks + Uncomfortable Data

My experiences over the years never amounted to mere personal friction or the challenging give-and-take of interfaith work. It was actually a small window into a much larger strategic convergence that has been taking shape for decades—the growing alliance between leftist revolutionaries and Islamist radicals, which is the focus of my forthcoming book When Marx Meets Islam: Navigating Radical Ideologies in Defense of the West. Building on the analysis first advanced by David Horowitz, I now see this partnership as an active “soft war” against the West—especially against the U.S.-Israel relationship anchoring Western security, primarily in the Middle East. The alliance is not made up of classic liberals or ordinary Muslims. Rather, it is composed of extremist ideologues who share a Marxist worldview that divides humanity into the “oppressed” and the “oppressors.” That binary fuels anger, resentment, and permanent victimhood while systematically targeting the civic culture of the West. The leftists supply the language of diversity and social justice, while the Islamists supply the energy and focus of religious absolutism. Together, they exploit the very openness and tolerance that define Western societies, turning those virtues into vulnerabilities and, at worse, threats.

The goal of the leftist-Islamist alliance, as I explain in the book, is not open dialogue or potential reform, but the gradual capture of institutions and the eventual displacement of democratic norms with radical alternatives. Once I understood that the pressure I faced was part of this broader campaign rather than isolated disagreement, the pattern of cancellation, self-censorship, and enforced silence became far more intelligible—and far more alarming. 

As the leftist-Islamist alliance came into focus, I grew disillusioned with the overlapping networks that present themselves as secular civil-rights or interfaith organizations. Behind the public affirmations of loyalty to the U.S. often lay a deeper resentment toward the country and the West at large. Both are portrayed as inherently racist and Islamophobic, an assessment I find both false and corrosive. Equally troubling is the widespread adoption by many Muslim Americans of a simplistic Marxist lens that divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” In this scheme Americans, Christians, Westerners, Jews, Israelis, and Zionists occupy the former category, while Palestinians, Muslims, and the Third World occupy the latter. The framework is intellectually lazy and a direct product of trends inside Western universities. It is also blatantly hypocritical, as there is a virtual silence among Muslim Americans regarding the plight of Christians around the world, particularly those living in Islamic countries.

The rupture within interfaith circles was especially revealing in recent years. Some Muslim communities prefer to partner only with Jews who reject Zionism—individuals who, in practice, prioritize Palestinian and Muslim interests above those of Israelis or even their own people. Genuine Jewish partners who are Zionists who affirm Israel’s right to exist are shunned and publicly condemned as “not the right kind of Jews” or “bad Jews.” This selective solidarity is inherent in Marxism and the “oppressor”-“oppressed” framework—Jews who remain Zionists are reclassified as evil, while those who renounce Zionism are welcomed as morally upright and on the “right side of history.”

With all that said, I do not argue that Islam should be barred from the United States. I do argue, however, that serious problems exist. A recent Pew Research poll found that 44% of Muslim Americans hold favorable views of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. That figure is unacceptable. It is a bleak commentary on our moment in time that opposition to Hamas, groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or to Qatari influence in the U.S., is automatically branded Islamophobic, bigoted, or racist. It is equally concerning that significant numbers of Muslim Americans have aligned themselves with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, a faction that has drifted toward socialist and communist premises. These are clear red lines for me as well. 

A Warning Grounded in Experience

Ultimately, my path from hopeful dialogue to this clearer assessment was shaped by accumulated experience, by observable patterns, and by the repeated refusal of too many to confront what stands in plain view. The moment I insisted on supporting Israel or examining Islamist networks with the same scrutiny applied to every other political movement, I discovered how quickly the language of tolerance can be weaponized to enforce silence. Regarding the academy, it once served as the institutional guardian of free inquiry, but it now often functions as its opposite, rewarding conformity and punishing deviation. If we cannot speak honestly about the doctrines, organizations, and demographic trends that challenge liberal democracy, then the Enlightenment project itself becomes a museum piece rather than a living organism.Defending those values requires the courage to apply them universally, without exemption for any progressive cause or interpretation of Islam.

I offer this account as a caution to progressives and to anyone still inclined to overlook the realities mentioned here. At the heart of what is under assault are the Enlightenment values that make free societies possible—individual liberty, freedom of conscience, open debate, and the right to follow evidence wherever it leads. These principles are the operating system of the West itself, not some optional cultural preferences. When any ideology—whether progressive identity politics or political Islam—demands that certain questions be placed off-limits, that certain groups be granted moral immunity, or that criticism itself be redefined as bigotry, those Enlightenment foundations are eroded. My own trajectory illustrates the cost.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

—Viktor E. Frankl

Violent extremism is neither the inevitable product of circumstance nor the unconstrained exercise of individual choice. It emerges where human vulnerability, social context, and ideological narratives intersect.

Every time a terrorist attack shocks the public, the search for an explanation begins. Was it religion? Poverty? Foreign policy? Social media? Discrimination? Mental illness?

The debate usually becomes a contest to identify the single cause that explains everything. If only we could find it, perhaps we could prevent the next attack.

But violent extremism has stubbornly resisted simple explanations. Among the most important questions is not simply why people accept extremist beliefs, but why those beliefs become meaningful enough to justify violence.

The more revealing question is not why a small number of people become violent extremists. It is why the overwhelming majority do not.

Millions of people experience injustice, humiliation, exclusion, political anger, or personal loss. Millions encounter extremist propaganda online. Millions struggle with questions of identity and belonging.

Almost none become terrorists.

That simple fact should force us to rethink the way we talk about radicalization.

Understanding why extremist movements attract followers is not an act of sympathy. It is a necessary part of preventing them from succeeding.

Viktor Frankl argued that the search for meaning is among humanity’s deepest motivations. Human beings do not live by facts alone; we live by stories about who we are, where we belong, and what gives our lives significance. Extremist movements understand this with unsettling clarity. Their greatest achievement is not recruiting people to violence but persuading individuals that violence itself has become meaningful, that destruction is a duty, sacrifice a virtue, and hatred a higher calling.

This is where ideology enters the story.

Ideology explains what people believe. Meaning helps explain why some become willing to kill, or die, for those beliefs.

Ideology provides the language. Meaning provides the motivation.

Extremist movements rarely begin by persuading recruits to embrace violence. They begin by offering an identity that makes sense of suffering, confers significance, and defines belonging. Grievances that once felt personal become part of a larger moral narrative. Violence becomes conceivable only after that identity has been internalized, when the ideology is no longer simply a set of beliefs but a way of understanding oneself and one’s place in the world.

At that point, violence can come to appear not as a departure from morality but as its fulfillment.

What extremist movements ultimately cultivate is not simply belief but moral identity. Once individuals come to see themselves as participants in a sacred struggle, compromise becomes betrayal and violence becomes an expression of fidelity to that identity.

That moral identity is built upon ordinary human longings: dignity, significance, purpose, and belonging. Extremist movements promise all four. Whether in jihadist movements that portray violence as a sacred duty, white supremacist movements that promise the restoration of a mythic racial order, or other violent extremist ideologies, the underlying appeal is remarkably similar: identity, belonging, and purpose become fused with a moral justification for violence. They transform private frustration into collective identity and personal grievance into moral obligation. The young engineer who cannot find work, the child of assimilated former refugees who feels he has lost every marker of identity, the isolated teenager spending nights online, and the veteran struggling to rediscover purpose after returning home inhabit different worlds. Yet each can confront the same human desire to matter.

The search for significance can lead to very different destinations. One person may find it in family, faith, work, service, or political activism. Another may find it in an extremist movement that fuses identity, belonging, and purpose with violence. The human needs may be similar; the stories that answer them are profoundly different.

But the search for meaning, however powerful, cannot by itself explain radicalization. People never choose in a vacuum. Some people live under genuine oppression, foreign occupation, political repression, or sectarian persecution. Such experiences can deepen grievances and intensify the search for significance, making extremist narratives more compelling. Yet these conditions alone do not explain terrorism, since the overwhelming majority of those who endure them reject violence against civilians.

The choices we perceive as available are shaped by our families, communities, schools, institutions, and political systems. Some grow up surrounded by diverse voices and competing identities that encourage curiosity. Others live where dissent is dangerous, institutions have collapsed, and identities are shaped by coercion and fear rather than by curiosity and meaningful choice. Agency exists, but it is never unconstrained. In some movements, it is constrained further by indoctrination, intimidation, or outright force. Such realities remind us that participation in violent extremism does not always reflect the same degree of conviction.

Recognizing these differences neither excuses violence nor reduces individuals to victims of circumstance. It reminds us that radicalization emerges from the interaction between human vulnerability and the environments people inhabit.

The same need for belonging can lead one person toward community service, another toward political activism, another toward religious devotion, and a minority toward violent extremism.

The challenge for democratic societies is therefore larger than preventing attacks.

Governments can investigate crimes, protect the public, prosecute offenders, and dismantle violent organizations. Those responsibilities are indispensable. Yet they cannot, by themselves, answer the deeper human questions that extremist movements exploit.

The deeper challenge is whether societies can offer people more compelling sources of identity than movements built on hatred, more durable forms of belonging than communities defined by exclusion, and more meaningful purposes than those found in violence.

Democracy’s greatest strength has never been its ability to eliminate grievance. No society can do that. Its strength lies in refusing to dictate a single identity, and encouraging the peaceful airing of those grievances. It permits people to belong to many communities at once—to family, faith, profession, neighborhood, nation, and humanity itself. It allows disagreement without requiring enmity. It creates space for meaning without demanding absolute allegiance.

Extremism cannot tolerate such plurality.

It demands that one identity consume every other loyalty until violence itself becomes an expression of virtue.

That is why the struggle against violent extremism is ultimately about more than intelligence operations, policing, or military power.

It begins with understanding why certain narratives become powerful.

Every terrorist attack prompts the same search for causes. But preventing the next attack requires asking a different question, not simply what people believe, but where they find purpose, belonging, and identity.

It is a struggle over the stories human beings tell about themselves.

Human beings search for meaning. Extremist movements exploit that search by offering belonging through hatred and purpose through violence. Democratic societies must answer that search by offering forms of community and identity that allow people to find significance without surrendering their humanity.

The vast majority of people who experience grievance, exclusion, or uncertainty do not choose violence; they find other ways to construct meaning, preserve dignity, and belong.

It is and always has been a battle for meaning.

Why moral courage is the only antidote to our culture of silence

Our current crisis of exploding and normalizing extremism is not an inevitable descent into moral decay, but a systemic failure of civil courage—one that spans every tier of modern society. When institutions falter and public discourse degrades, it is tempting, and perhaps a bit too convenient, to point fingers exclusively at those sitting in executive suites or political offices. Leaders are in positions to lead for a reason, and when they exhibit a complete absence of spine, they deserve relentless accountability.

Yet leadership does not exist in a vacuum. The silence at the top is sustained, sanitized, and ultimately incentivized by the quiet complicity of everyone below. The crisis of our moment is not merely that leaders are failing to lead, but that everyday citizens have accepted an unspoken bargain: personal quietude in exchange for long-term moral erosion.

The Game Theory of Silence

Cowardice is rarely a single, catastrophic decision; it is a cumulative habit built on a distorted incentive structure. Human beings naturally calculate risk, and our current cultural architecture heavily penalizes courage while rewarding passivity.

Speaking out carries an immediate, localized cost. It creates awkwardness at the dinner table, friction with a manager, or social tension in a peer group. In an era where public discourse is hyper-fractured, calling out dehumanizing rhetoric or blatant bigotry is frequently twisted into an act of hostility or framed as an inherent alignment with the “opposing political tribe.” Modern outrage dynamics thrive on stripping context, forcing individuals to choose between total tribal conformity or social exile.

Conversely, staying silent seems free. The cost of complicity—the gradual degradation of societal norms, the erosion of trust, and the normalization of extremism—is delayed and distributed across the entire community. Faced with an immediate, concentrated penalty versus a distant, collective threat, the rational individual routinely chooses to look away.

This asymmetry of risk is precisely how bad ideas capture good institutions. When the cost of speaking truth exceeds the perceived cost of acquiescence, cowardice becomes the default modus operandi.

Principles as the Only Anchor

To break this cycle, we must ground our courage in something sturdier than tribal allegiance or emotional outrage: universal, principled standards.

True civil courage is fundamentally non-partisan. It rests not on demanding universal politeness, but on enforcing non-negotiable boundaries: the equal application of rules, the protection of individual liberty, and an unyielding taboo against overt bigotry, explicit dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence—regardless of who commits the violation or who is targeted. If we only defend these standards when our political enemies cross them, while excusing them when our allies do the same, we are not demonstrating courage; we are participating in partisan enforcement.

Importantly, enforcing these moral taboos is not “cancel culture.” Mob justice seeks to ruin individuals for mere disagreement, nuance, or minor transgressions, enforcing ideological orthodoxy through public destruction. Restoring universal boundaries against bigotry and violence, by contrast, is basic civic hygiene. Social and civil consequences are the civil society alternative to state coercion. Historically, extreme hate groups were marginalized not because the government banned their speech, but because decent citizens made social and professional affiliation with them unviable.

Principles, however, are meaningless if they cost us nothing. A conviction discarded the moment it threatens our standing or professional comfort is not a principle at all—it is social posture, not conviction. Yet when we step up in defense of universal norms, we do not speak into a void. The vast majority of people do not subscribe to fanaticism; they are simply intimidated into silence. A single principled voice breaks the illusion of consensus and gives others the permission structure they need to stand up as well.

Shifting the Incentives Across the Cascade

If cowardice is a product of broken incentives, then restoring moral health requires altering those incentives across every level of civic and professional life. We cannot rely on wishing for braver leaders; we must make passivity more visibly costly than action through three everyday pressure points:

• The Workplace and Institutional Sphere: Most organizations already possess written codes of conduct and explicit anti-harassment policies. Yet, when abusive or radical behavior occurs internally, leadership frequently kicks the can down the road to avoid immediate PR disruption. Employees and mid-level managers must hold institutions to their own stated standards. Calling out policy violations is not “creating friction”; it is demanding basic organizational integrity.
• The Commercial and Platform Ecosystem: Businesses, media outlets, and digital platforms rely on financial and social legitimacy. When companies sanitize hate speech or elevate bad-faith provocateurs for easy engagement, consumers and partners must exercise their economic leverage. Making complicity unprofitable is one of the most effective ways to force institutional spine.
• Informal Associations and Social Circles: The most intimate—and often most difficult—sphere of enforcement happens in our local communities, professional networks, and social groups. Extremist rhetoric is rarely mainstreamed overnight; it is first sanitized at dinner tables, in private group chats, and during casual gatherings where people nod along to keep the peace. Refusing to offer social respectability to dehumanizing rhetoric within our own circles is the frontline of defense.

The Unexpected Dividend of Courage

Importantly, the cost of standing up is routinely overestimated. Because the vast majority of citizens already share these core values and abhor extreme bigotry, anyone who stands up for universal taboos is not stepping out onto a narrow ledge; they are standing on the side of the overwhelming majority.

That is not to suggest that taking a stand is completely costless. In certain insular fields like academia, there can be short-term economic friction. In personal life, it may mean losing ties with individuals who have surrendered their judgment to explicit hostility or deep-seated tribalism—though in truth, such relationships were already conditional on total compliance and unlikely to last.

Yet for every person who experiences a momentary freeze or social loss for defending basic principles, ten others discover an immediate and liberating dividend. Speaking out ends the exhausting burden of self-censorship. It restores personal integrity and independent thought. Far from resulting in isolation, principled courage serves as a beacon: it attracts other independently minded, principled people whose trust and respect are built on shared integrity rather than fragile tribal performance.

When we calculate the equation of civil courage, we cannot focus solely on what might be lost in the short term. We must look at what is immediately gained in independence, self-respect, and genuine community. Courage is contagious not only because it inspires, but because the freedom it confers is enviable. By choosing principled action over easy quietude, we alter the calculus for everyone around us, transforming silence from a safe harbor into an obvious risk. The survival of a free and humane society depends on our willingness to pay the small, short-term price of courage today to avoid the catastrophic cost of cowardice tomorrow.

Dear Rabbi Winer,

Sitting on the terrace of my hotel and looking over the marina at Gordon Beach, I was awed by your decision to validate New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s most recent travesty of journalism and, perhaps unwittingly, give yet more ammunition to those who would like to see Gordon Beach (along with the rest of Tel Aviv) returned to its “rightful” owners.

In the face of so much evidence that should, at a minimum, raise doubt about the factual basis of Kristof’s screed, you invoke rabbinic authority with apparent indifference to the effects of your words on the Jewish condition generally and the situation here in Israel specifically. Here your analysis will elicit shrugs from a population exhausted from war and accustomed to incessant reproach from outsiders modestly offering “tough love.” But the courageous humanists of Park Slope will surely be grateful for your gift, and from an orthodox rabbi no less! (At least we now know that the Reform movement doesn’t have a complete lock on phony left wing anti-Israel “progressivism”; let’s hope that Rabbi Amiel Hirsch’s call to action reaches your minyans, too.)

How and why you chose to side with Kristof against his critics—including Deborah Lipstadt, one of the most learned writers and thinkers on matters of Israel, Judaism, and anti-Semitism—is simply incomprehensible. You object to the “mainstream Jewish response,” and take aim in particular at the American Jewish Committee, for “slandering courageous survivors.” But opposition to Kristof’s essay was registered widely and deeply. For example, I refer you to the outrage expressed by conscientious journalists elsewhere, as well as to rebuttals from rabbis, jurists, and canine experts; and from Israelis who may be known for their opposition to their current government and could use help, not harangues, from their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora.

That sexual violence raises moral questions is indisputable. I suppose we should be grateful to you for that reminder and for including the liturgical lesson. With respect, though, I hope you didn’t mean to suggest that sexual violence is so complicated that we need Talmudic or Biblical reasoning to condemn it; or, worse yet, that we might excuse it based on some other theological interpretation of written or oral law or the poetry in prayer books. I imagine there has been spirited discussion in Israel’s many and diverse synagogues over all this, even before you weighed in. And you will perhaps be glad to know that the secular Israeli press and legal system haven’t exactly been sleeping through the alarms ringing with allegations of IDF abuse. Your input, I’m sure, is welcome, even if it does come across as a bit self righteous.

In any case, the main question here is about the validity of the claims and not whether, if valid, they violate moral or ethical or religious norms. Kristof has a track record for being unfriendly to Israel, so I’m not surprised he’d go off the rails with the sordid tale of canine rape he heard from some of his “sources.” But I am surprised that you accept his “evidence” as sufficient to indict the alleged perpetrators of those heinous acts and as robust enough to impugn, by innuendo if not in so many words, the whole population and its government. (To estimate how representative of Israel those alleged acts were, by the way, requires statistical analysis well outside Kristof’s intellectual range; that he didn’t even think to ask the question, though, is stunning for its insufferable arrogance).

This egregious lapse in editorial responsibility brings to mind what I’d call the Seinfeld principle, based on this exchange between Jerry and a priest in one of the most memorable episodes of the show:

JERRY: …I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Whatley. I have a suspicion that he’s converted to Judaism purely for the jokes.

FATHER CURTIS: And this offends you as a Jewish person?

JERRY: No, it offends me as a comedian.

Does Kristof’s article offend me as a Jew? Yes, and I make no apology for my apparent lapse into Jewish particularism. But I am—or, perhaps, even more—offended as a former journalist. In my college years, I worked at the New York Times, where the masters tried hard to teach me about journalistic integrity and evidentiary standards. My impulses to believe and then report juicy stories of crime and corruption had to be tamed by the rigors of sourcing and fact-checking, requirements that seem to no longer be enforced, especially on the opinion pages. (As editor of my campus newspaper, I was sometimes guilty of violating those rules when I blasted this or that student or administrator with whom I disagreed on political or ideological grounds; at the Times, I had better supervision.) 

Kristof’s self-righteous tone and sloppy reproach of Israel do offend me as a Jew. But his article should offend anyone really, Jewish or not, who believes that a free and credible press run by professionals who aspire to high standards of evidence is a linchpin of our democracy. For decades, the Times was the standard bearer of journalistic excellence, its lapses and imperfections notwithstanding; but, with Kristof’s piece, it has stooped a to sensationalism that was once the province of tabloids and is now the fuel powering wildly uncurated social media engines. Today it’s dogs raping Palestinian freedom fighters, tomorrow it will be Jews with horns wrecking the global economy.

Invoking the Seinfeld principle, then, the main objection to Kristof—even for people who may share his discomfort with what Israel is and for what it stands—should be his egregious failure to apply rules of evidence in making his claims. (Just check his sources!) His enablers and editors who rose to his defense have also abdicated their professional and moral responsibility, and together they have placed at risk one of the real treasures of the American media system.

I expect readers of this letter might ask the obvious follow-up question: did Rabbi Winer’s essay offend me as a Jew? I’ll respond in Jewish fashion, with a question: shouldn’t it?

Thank you for listening.

“You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.”

—Bob Dylan

As children growing up, most of us enjoyed pretending to be someone else. I even remember in my childhood there was a rock song “The Great Pretender.” With maturity, those dreams disappeared. In recent years, however, pretense has become a frequently used tactic in politics. One of the most obvious techniques is the political version of “bait and switch,” in which a politician pretends to have one identity or ideology to get elected, whereupon (s)he reverts to their true views.

A recent example is Abigail Spanberger, who ran for Governor of Virginia in 2025 posing as a moderate and citing her employment with the CIA before being elected to Congress, but, after being elected, has governed as a radical, restoring the green energy program that serves mainly to increase fuel and energy prices; pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies; and seeking to tax practically everything except (possibly) the air we breathe. Her example has been widely copied, especially since her party is having increasing difficulty attracting one of its traditional bases: white working-class voters, especially men.

It is understandable that people are reluctant to support politicians who characterize them as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” (by Barack Obama), “deplorables” (by Hillary Clinton) or “garbage” (by President Biden), not to mention the snide observation by FBI agent Peter Strzok that he could smell them at Walmart. After seeing white non-college graduates, a demographic that still represents 40% of the electorate, increasingly supporting Republicans, with a peak of 66% voting for Donald Trump in 2024, the left realized that a majority of Americans didn’t share their views. Modifying their platform wasn’t an option, so they opted for searching their ranks for candidates who could appeal to working-class white voters while downplaying their true views.

One of the first products of the search for “Mr. White” was Tim Walz, who didn’t exactly set the world on fire as governor of Minnesota and vice presidential nominee, though some of his supporters did. Walz’s recent pardon of a child molester who was, thankfully, promptly deported was just the latest in a long series of acts defending illegal immigrants culminating when a personal scandal compelled him to abandon his re-election campaign. At this point, the left and their media acolytes transferred their affection to Graham Platner, winner of the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in Maine. Platner tried to appear to be a working man, like good old “Lunch Bucket” Joe Biden from Scranton, although it turned out that his cover as an oysterman was a business financed by his affluent family whose only customer was his mother’s restaurant. Nothing could derail his campaign: not having a Nazi SS tattoo; not a history of anti-Semitism; not distorting his military history; not his description of his fellow soldiers as fools for their service—not even allegations of sexual abuse from his Republican former girlfriend, whose complaint was disregarded. It was only after a similar accusation from a Democratic ex-girlfriend surfaced that his party’s leaders reluctantly forced him off the ballot. Apparently, the catchphrase “#BelieveAllWomen”—created to advance the absurd sexual allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in 2018—applies only to Democrat women.

With Platner’s political demise, all attention now turned to another “Great White Hope,” Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, whose primary claim to fame was being an evangelical Christian. Talarico’s candidacy, too, has drawbacks. He claims Jesus was multiply gendered, and, at a more mundane level, is a militant vegetarian in a state with a sizable cattle industry. We’ll have to see how that turns out.

While all these Democrats are trying to conceal their positions, others now seem confident enough to reveal theirs. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are increasingly becoming the dominant force in the Democratic Party, have just released their platform, “Workers Deserve More!” to which every candidate seeking their endorsement must subscribe. Among its provisions, as reported by Stu Smith in City Journal (and published by the DSA and numerous other sources):

• “…the replacement of ‘the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.’”
• “…full public financing for campaigns and the abolition of the Electoral College.”
• “…the establishment of public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability, and strict regulations on investment properties.”
• “…defund the Department of War, close overseas bases, and end all economic sanctions—which would include those in states like Iran, Cuba, and Russia.”
• “…universal amnesty for illegal immigrants, and ending ‘restrictions on … marriage,’ which would presumably entail the legalization of polygamy.”
• “…the abolition of the carceral elements of the capitalist state,” i.e. prisons and police.
• “…a provision explicitly naming Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.”
• “…ranked-choice voting.”

As radical as this program may sound, it represents no more than the traditional realization of communism. As Stu Smith explains, “‘Workers Deserve More!’ has revolutionary aspirations. It aims to ’win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.’ The document makes clear that achieving this vision would require ‘building a new society from the ground up,’ accompanied by sweeping structural changes.”

What is truly alarming about this platform is that it is coming ever closer to being adopted as the DSA consolidates its control of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by the fear of establishment progressive Democrats of speaking out against it: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) claimed not to have read it; Ilhan Omar (D-MN) refused to answer any questions about it; Pete Aguilar (D-CA) asserted that, since he wasn’t a DSA member, he couldn’t comment.

In sum, the U.S.A. has lasted for 250 years, which is widely held to be the average lifetime of a human society. Can we beat the odds by going further? When asked as he left the Constitutional Convention what kind of government the assembly had given us, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Can we? Time will tell.

The First Amendment protects the speech we hate from the state; civil society must reject it.

The term “stochastic terrorism” has become fraught in public discourse, weaponized in partisan skirmishes to discredit speech by associating it with violent outcomes. Free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff recently disparaged the concept as a dangerous rhetorical device, while essayist Scott Alexander argued comprehensively against it in the Substack article “Against ‘Stochastic Terrorism.’” The concern from civil libertarians is valid: allowing vague accusations of “incitement” to carry legal penalties risks establishing a powerful tool for state censorship, undermining the First Amendment.

Yet, that a term is misapplied in daily political warfare does not mean the underlying phenomenon should be dismissed. Alexander is correct that the term is conceptually broken when used to trace subjective lines of causality from mainstream debate to isolated crimes. But stripping away the flawed jargon reveals an objective threat: the public endorsement of violence and overt bigotry that veers into eliminationist rhetoric—the implication that a specific group has no right to safely exist. When individuals cross from sharp political critique into legitimizing or celebrating acts of terror, they are not merely engaging in provocative expression; they are constructing a permission structure for destruction.

In confronting this threat, we must draw a firm line between legal accountability and social consequences. As a constitutional absolutist, I believe the government cannot and should not restrict this speech, save for rare instances meeting the high judicial threshold for direct incitement (Brandenburg v. Ohio). But I do not extend that absolutism to the societal domain. A liberal society is under no obligation to grant equal standing to those who actively advocate for its violent dismantling. To discourage social ostracism against those who seek our destruction is to unilaterally disarm one of our most vital cultural defenses.

For too long, the dominant narrative promoted by free speech purists has been that the only remedy for toxic rhetoric is simply “more speech.” This optimism fails to recognize modern media echo chambers, often deliberately amplified by foreign adversaries, and the nature of ideological conflict entrepreneurs who deliberately inflame divisions for profit or clout. More critically, when civil libertarians reflexively treat every attempt to isolate dangerous rhetoric as a nascent free speech violation, they inadvertently demand cultural passivity. In doing so, they flatten the concept of liberty by forgetting that a right to speak free from governmental prosecution does not demand immunity from societal consequences, nor does it require civil society to pretend eliminationist rhetoric is benign.

We have understood this distinction before. When the Third Klan operated in the mid-twnetieth century, civil society enforced an unyielding baseline: Klan members lost their jobs, standing, and became pariahs when unmasked. Critics might argue that comparing organized sheets and hoods to today’s decentralized radicalism is a false equivalence.

But the analogy holds precisely because of that structural shift. Today’s illiberal movements rely on disorganization and online anonymity to shield themselves from legal accountability. Movements like Antifa or the Proud Boys openly advocate violence, engage in targeted intimidation, and vandalize public spaces, using a lack of formal hierarchy as legal armor. Because we are no longer dealing with traditional groups defined by official rosters, formal membership status can no longer determine who deserves social consequences. We must look entirely at the individual: what they explicitly say, what they do, and with whom they choose to associate. A lack of a corporate charter should not protect individuals from social consequences. We didn’t defeat the Klan by debating them, and we do not need to mainstream modern extremists who explicitly promote the destruction of the liberal order.

This principled ostracism introduces moral accountability by association. If an individual closely associates with those who violate core taboos by encouraging violence and bigotry, they cannot remain neutral observers. Civil society must require them to explicitly condemn that behavior to retain their standing. They are not immediately or permanently exiled, but they must demonstrate that they are willing to hold the line.

Crucially, this burden applies with greater weight to elite cultural and academic institutions. The true danger of eliminationist rhetoric hardens when universities, corporate boards, and media outlets sanitize the endorsement of violence under the guise of institutional neutrality or selective academic freedom. When leadership structures refuse to enforce basic moral boundaries, they act as institutional conflict enablers, providing cover for behavior that should be socially radioactive and laundering extremism into acceptable discourse.

Because we cannot discern internal intent—whether driven by financial profit or a need for social belonging—we must focus strictly on external output. We should treat participants with uniform principles, but apply a graduated scale of consequences centered on grace, stopping short of tolerating our own destruction. Those who most egregiously violate universal taboos—and profit from doing so—must face the heaviest exile, becoming as toxic as David Duke was to polite society. Conversely, those merely going with the flow, yet sharing guilt in amplifying or sanitizing violence, should face probationary ostracism—offering a clear opportunity to soften their views, condemn the hate, and return to acceptable ground.

Predictably, critics will warn this opens the door to moral hyperinflation. We have seen how terms like “bigot” and “racist” were hollowed out through over-application, and accusations of stochastic terrorism are frequently lobbed based on subjective, partisan interpretations of coded “dog whistles.” Civil society cannot adjudicate every perceived dog whistle without collapsing into an ideological witch hunt. Therefore, our adjudication must prioritize clear, indisputable behavioral evidence—literal threats or overt calls to violence—rather than subtext. Our focus must be strictly bound to eliminating explicit instances of eliminationist bigotry and the endorsement of violence.

What prevents this framework from devolving into “cancel culture” is the mandate of the open door. Unlike arbitrary cancellation, which demands permanent destruction, principled ostracism builds a bridge back to civil society. Every participant must be allowed a clear path to apologize, clarify their views, repair the harm, and be redeemed. Even when a violation is flagrant, the door remains unlocked. However, accountability dictates that the more harm caused, the more repair an individual must perform.

Enforcing these boundaries through social pressure rather than state power reinforces our invisible guardrails. It makes it mathematically and socially harder for conflict manufacturers to keep pushing cultural boundaries until they cease to exist. We don’t need the state to censor speech, but we must stop treating the endorsement of eliminationist bigotry and violence as just another point of view that we can dismiss or debate away. Freedom of speech is a limit on government power, not a mandate for cultural surrender.

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after October 7, 2023—even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on—weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally coordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-October 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80% of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organizations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organizations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have cooperated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

U.S.-based progressive foundations and far-left activist groups, such as the Open Society Foundation, Action Network, Cultures of Resistance and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, are providing significant funding and support, facilitating donations and strengthening the British protests.

Some of these groups have helped inspire violence in the United States. Last month, U.S. prosecutors indicted eight current and former students at the University of Michigan for conspiring to threaten university leaders, law enforcement, businesses and the Jewish Federation.

The indictment stated that one of the internet websites used by the defendants to spread their demands belonged to Palestine Action, the U.K. group that continues to attract passionate support from otherwise respectable, middle-class Brits, despite having been proscribed by the government as a terrorist outfit.

Well-meaning, if ignorant, people continue to support such organizations on the naïve assumption that they help the oppressed.

The Islamist program to subvert the Western mind has relentlessly focused for years on universities and schools. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy has just published another vitally important report, “Institutional Capture,” which documents how anti-West, Islamist Qatar has reshaped American education in a devastating program of cultural infiltration.

Over the past 16 years, according to the report, Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the U.S. member of the Doha-based Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, has conducted a systematic campaign to embed itself within American educational institutions.

Deploying at least $65.3 million across 220 documented initiatives between 2009 and 2025, it has been a “manipulator of thought” in social studies, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, as well as in youth engagement, professional development and social activism initiatives.

Through corporate restructuring and strategic partnerships, it has leveraged the reputation of host organizations to embed the Qatari viewpoint on the Middle East in educational materials served up to students in both universities and K–12 schools.

At national conferences for social studies educators, it has stacked the proceedings with presenters trained by QFI to present Qatari talking points.

The result has been an educational echo chamber that “casts doubt on Israel’s very existence, rejects curriculum that teaches students about the efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Arab states, and normalizes and relativizes terrorism.”

This is the template for the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term strategy for civilizational jihad against Western society, turning educational institutions into a weapon of war by shaping, producing and normalizing ideological positions that fit the agenda of conquering the West for Islam.

It’s scant wonder, therefore, that the West has fallen victim to a psychotic madness about Israel’s fictitious perfidies—a malevolent narrative of demonization that is in turn a Trojan horse for suicidal anti-Western loathing and contempt among the elites. Millions of people are being manipulated on a staggering scale.

America is beginning to grapple with this. In March, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released nearly 900 pages of documents detailing two major American university partnerships in Qatar.

As the Jewish Institute for National Security of America observed in its own analysis of these documents last month, they showed that Qatar has “used complex funding contracts with American universities to acquire access to intellectual property, governance deliberation, academic credentialing and institutional reputation, which it has used to help support Islamist movements hostile to the United States and its allies.”

The release of those documents galvanized the introduction last month of legislation to ban federal funding to colleges that operate branch campuses in adversarial countries, or accept research funding for sensitive fields like artificial intelligence, biotech, and quantum computing.

That’s a welcome development, but acute concerns still remain. This process of jihadi infiltration has been going on for decades. Successive British governments and U.S. administrations have refused to acknowledge the civilizational threat that it poses.

In large measure, this is because the West can’t understand Islamic religious fanaticism. It assumes that everyone in the world is, like itself, governed by self-interest. So it simply can’t get its collective head around the fact that Islamists are apocalyptic and messianic, and believe they have a divine command to conquer Israel, America, and the West for Islam.

U.S. President Donald Trump seems to make the same mistake. True, none of us can know what’s in his mind. Maybe he really does understand the Islamists’ mindset and is playing a long game to reel them in.

But maybe he believes that the Iranian regime and other Islamists are driven by the same self-interest as in his own world, and that therefore he can end all such conflict through his supposedly unmatched art of the deal.

Such concerns are exacerbated by the extremely troubling financial links between members of Trump’s circle and Qatar. Rather than treating it as the enemy of the civilization that it is, Trump has used Qatar as a trusted interlocutor in talks with Hamas, the Taliban and Iran. His apparently unshakeable belief in the universality of venal self-interest presumably explains his disbelief that the Iranian regime won’t accept that its devastating military losses mean it’s lost the war.

It explains his view that Gaza’s Islamist lions would obviously be turned into lambs by the prospect of the Strip’s transformation into a property developer’s Riviera paradise.

And it may explain his support for Turkey’s menacing Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. According to Trump, Erdoğan almost entered the war in support of Iran and against America, but the U.S. president talked him out of it. Now, Trump reportedly intends to reward him for this by selling him F-35 warplanes.

Taking his words at their face value (which may always be a mistake), this suggests that narcissistic fantasies prevent this American president from understanding what being an Islamist means.

So as Trump continues to give us all political whiplash by his on-off-on Iran war, and as the West allows its mouth to be stuffed with Qatari gold, the Islamists fight on—as they’ve done ever since the seventh century—playing the longest civilizational war game in the world.

A version of this article first appeared in JNS. Used with permission.

On the morning of July 27, 1944,
in a quiet courtyard in Lwów,

a manhole cover… slowly lifted.

A sewer worker called down into the darkness…
“Come out… You’re free!”

From beneath the earth,
ten figures emerged.

Starved.
Broken.
Barely recognizable as human.

And the man who led them out, Leopold Socha, turned to the stunned crowd and declared:
“This is my work… These are my Jews.”

Fourteen months earlier,
One man made a daring decision.

My grandfather, Ignacy Chiger, a husband, and a father of two young children… engineered a prison break in reverse…
into a prison without walls.

He dug a tunnel.
He broke through three feet of concrete.
And he led his family down into it… into the sewers.
Into darkness.

This is not just a Holocaust story.

It is a story of strategy
of leadership
of what a father will do… when no other options exist.

Readers of my grandfather’s memoir will encounter evil in its rawest form
under both Soviet and Nazi occupation.

But they will also witness something else… a redemption story of Leopold Socha… a sewer worker… a petty thief… who became a savior
and rose as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Out of 150,000 Jews in Lwów,
260 remained alive.

Only one family… with two young children… survived.

My family.

In 1975, my grandfather sat down, for the first time,
and wrote this memoir from memory.

Six months later… he was gone.

I did not publish this book simply to tell his story.

I published it to give his voice the reach,
the clarity,
and the urgency… that this moment demands.

As a second and third generation survivor, I don’t just share history.

I ask audiences to confront it.

What does survival really require?
What does moral courage look like today?

Because memory without responsibility
is simply nostalgia.

The activist group “NYC Educators for Palestine” is staging a “teach-in” for New York public school children of all ages, using Martin Luther King Day to equate the non-violent movement for black American civil rights with anti-Jewish jihad.

What these propagandists will never tell children as young as 6 is that their actions are covering up for history’s greatest anti-black catastrophes while blaming innocent Jews.

For a start, many of Dr. King’s own African ancestors were trafficked to the Americas in the first place partially as the result of the enslavement of black people by Palestinians’ fellow Muslims. Arabs and Islamized Africans bear substantial responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with the Europeans buying many slaves from Muslim rulers who eagerly profited from selling off their non-Muslim war captives.

By contrast, Jews were among the most passionate opponents of racial discrimination in America, making up nearly a quarter of all white freedom riders, with some murdered alongside blacks for their anti-racist activism.

Professed Arab “concern” for black civil rights during the 1960s was actually no more than a cynical disinformation campaign concocted by Communist China and the KGB to pull politically active black Americans closer towards Third Worldist Marxism and away from patriotic integrationism.

But these “educators” are hiding something much worse: Arabs and Muslims, kin to the Palestinians, still own black slaves today. The following could serve as the basis for any serious curriculum on black-Arab relations:

In Algeria and Libya, tens of thousands of Africans attempting to make their way to Europe are enslaved by local Arabs, some terrorist militiamen. The Global Slavery Index says that they number 84,000 and 47,000 respectively. Those who escape have detailed torture, blackmail, and use as grunt labor, with CNN disseminating chilling video in 2017 of a nighttime auction in which two Nigerien men were sold for the equivalent of $400 apiece. The U.S. State Department’s 2024 human rights report on Libya documents that “criminal and nonstate armed groups controlling extralegal facilities routinely tortured and abused detainees [including refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants], subjecting them to arbitrary killings, rape and sexual violence, beatings, electric shocks, burns, forced labor, and deprivation of food and water, according to dozens of testimonies shared with international aid agencies and human rights groups. In many instances, the purpose of this abuse was reportedly to extort payments from detainees’ families.” Those black migrants within Algeria who are not enslaved also face deeply-seated (systemic) racism.

In Mauritania—a 100% Muslim country—the Arab and Berber minority rule over a true apartheid state in which the black majority is treated as sub-human and racist violence is commonplace. For centuries, Africans have been owned as complete chattel—bequeathed in wills, rented out between friends, and given as gifts to pay gambling debts or as part of dowries. Well within living memory, many were tortured unimaginably. French colonial administrators banned slavery in 1901 and 1905, but to no avail. Then, the year after independence, Mauritania banned it again in 1961; then again in 1980 and 1981; then criminalized it in 2007, and then further criminalized it in 2015. Today, despite some finally being freed, the Global Slavery Index estimates 149,000 Africans are still enslaved, with an unspecified number caught in more modern forms of bondage, such as wage theft. Abolitionists are also subject to violence and repression, one imprisoned in 2018 for planning to run for president.

In Sudan, thousands are still enslaved 21 years after the end of a racist jihad perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood junta which dominated the country from 1989 to 2019 (and now does again). In scenes repellently similar to October 7, Arab Muslim militias armed by the state would penetrate into the mostly Christian south, storm villages, shoot and behead the adult men, burn the huts to the ground, and drag away black women and children as chattel slaves. The women became concubines, the girls domestics (before becoming concubines), and the boys herders (often murdered once they reached adulthood). All were forcibly converted to Islam; all suffered physical and racial abuse; many were physically mutilated. Perhaps 200,000 were kidnapped between 1983 and 2002 and 2 million killed before a peace deal was finally signed in 2005. One vague estimate for those still in bondage is 35,000. Today, Arab Sudan is once again waging a genocide against the black Muslims in the western Darfur province in which human bondage, particularly sexual slavery, has re-emerged, with untold numbers of black women raped—some even marched away in chains. As of 2025, the separatist Rapid Support Forces may have killed 200,000 Africans since the conflict re-ignited in 2023, but any estimate is faulty.

Additionally, the Arab world itself is also a major center of black slavery. Impoverished African women, often from Nigeria and Uganda, are tricked into answering advertisements for decent-paying jobs as domestic servants in countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and the Gulf states—Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular. Once there, passports confiscated, they are plunged into long hours of unpaid labor: some sold from trafficker to master, many raped, some forced into prostitution, some beaten for taking a day off, some sent to prison for escaping—some murdered and mutilated for trying to return home. In 2020, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, claimed that as many as 80,000 women had been trafficked across Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into sexual slavery from Nigeria alone. Some Nigerian women have even been trafficked as far east as Iraq, enduring rape, forced abortion, and gruesome torture. Africans are also trafficked to the migrant slave labor hub of Qatar, forced into debt to pay their recruitment fees and often taking up jobs as cleaners and security guards, but always running the risk of being abandoned without food or pay.

Africans are sometimes even enslaved by non-Arab Muslims like Boko Haram in Nigeria. In Hamas-style attacks, Boko Haram terrorists have raided boarding schools and Christian villages, dragging off boys to train as child soldiers and girls to distribute amongst themselves for “marriage” as concubines. In 2014, 276 Christian girls were abducted from the town of Chibok, causing some short-lived concern among mainstream media and political figures like Michelle Obama; as of 2025, however, 91 are still in captivity. In 2018, Boko Haram stormed a school in Dapchi, kidnapping 110 students, killing five, and demanding a ransom for their release. That October, when a ransom was organized, Boko Haram refused to release one 15-year-old girl, Leah Sharibu, because she refused to convert to Islam, proclaiming her a “slave for life.” Now approaching 23, Leah is still a slave, reportedly “married” to a Boko Haram terrorist and mother to his two children.

It’s clear that any “Palestine teach-in” will conceal all of these grisly facts. Because the liars who hijack Martin Luther King Day for the purposes of Hamas and Iran’s Islamic rulers are exclusively interested in training American children to hate Jews. If they were truly to honor Dr. King, as opposed to hijacking his good name, they’d do what he would have wanted: demand that Arabs and Muslims free their black slaves. But we won’t be holding our breath.

The New York “anti-racist” Palestinianist teachers would never tell public school students that there is a neighborhood in Gaza principally home to residents of African origin called “al-Abid.” Abid is an Arabic slang term meaning both “black” and “slave”—a rough equivalent of the N-word. Those Palestinians “face entrenched racism,” says JFeed, “frequently denied leadership positions, excluded from certain professions, and pressured to marry within their own community.” Black Americans who have learned of this long obscured fact are neither endeared to the Palestinian cause nor blame the Jews.

Even less likely is that an anti-Israel “teach-in” would include as “balance” the 2010 accusation that Hamas rounded up, tortured, and harvested internal organs from 250 black Eritreans trekking through the Sinai to seek asylum—in Israel.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2004, the prestigious Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, welcomed Francis Buk, an African immigrant who had been brutally kidnapped at 7 and owned as a chattel slave in Sudan for a decade, to speak to its students. “The question is what good [is] your freedom if you don’t use it, to help others who live [for] and dream of freedom?” Buk told local news after his emotional speech. Would these “teachers” deign to let Buk or any other survivor of modern-day Arab slavery address children—let alone ones who could see the tears in his eyes?

Dr. King was a resolute Zionist. He wanted nothing to do with Jew-haters of any color or persuasion. Teaching the truths outlined above would be what he would want done on his day. Not using that day, in which we honor his dreams, to promote a hatred he fought to eliminate.

A version of this article first appeared in JNS. Used with permission.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Jewish tradition reads this not only as a reflection on time, but as a warning against ill-timed action. Often less noticed is that the same principle applies to judgment itself. There are moments when judgment is necessary, and moments when it becomes a moral error precisely because it arrives too early.

Modern life encourages the opposite tendency. It rewards immediacy. A claim appears, and interpretation follows at once. An event occurs, and moral categories are assigned within minutes. Public discourse has become a system optimized for the speed of judgment rather than the patience of understanding. The result is not only frequent error, but a deeper loss—the erosion of the habit of withholding judgment until understanding has had time to mature.

Jewish law is built on an opposing instinct. It treats judgment not as a spontaneous act of perception but as a disciplined procedure. A court does not begin with conclusions but with witnesses, examination, cross-examination, and deliberation. The aim is not simply to discover truth but to cultivate the patience that allows certainty to be grounded in understanding. Judgment, in this sense, is less an act of intuition than a discipline of restraint.

This caution extends beyond legal procedure. It is woven into the moral grammar of Jewish life. The tradition repeatedly warns against lashon ha-ra, not only because harmful speech injures others, but because it trains the speaker to mistake partial knowledge for sufficient grounds for moral conclusion. Rabbinic tradition goes further, teaching that lashon ha-ra harms three people at once: the person spoken about, the one who listens, and the speaker himself. What begins as description easily hardens into judgment, and then into character assassination. The ethical concern is not merely what is said, but how readily the mind converts observation into verdict.

Jewish ethics therefore distinguishes between evaluating conduct and defining character. Actions may require condemnation, yet no single act exhausts the meaning of a human life. Moral judgment becomes dangerous when it mistakes one event for an entire identity, reducing a person to the worst thing they have done or to the narrowest account of who they are.

This discipline also shapes the Jewish understanding of justice itself. Even in Scripture, judgment is presented as something that invites moral reflection rather than passive acceptance. Abraham does not simply accept G-d’s announced judgment as beyond question; he asks, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” (Genesis 18:25). He appeals to G-d’s own justice. G-d does not rebuke Abraham for questioning. Instead, the narrative presents moral argument itself as an expression of covenantal responsibility. Abraham’s protest does not challenge judgment itself, but calls for it to be understood in light of divine righteousness. His challenge suggests that justice is not always immediately transparent, and that fidelity to it sometimes requires resisting premature certainty.

The Hebrew Bible also illustrates this danger in the story of Joseph. His brothers looked upon him through the lens of jealousy and resentment. They interpreted his dreams as arrogance, his favored status as provocation, and his future as a threat. Their judgment seemed certain enough to justify selling him into slavery. Only years later did they discover that the story they believed they understood had scarcely begun. What appeared to be the end of one brother’s life became the means through which an entire family and Egypt itself would be preserved. Their error was not merely moral but epistemic: they mistook a single moment in an unfolding story for the whole truth. Their mistake was not simply false judgment but premature judgment. They assumed that what they could presently see exhausted the meaning of what was taking place.

This same reluctance to mistake certainty for understanding also shapes rabbinic intellectual life. Rabbinic culture develops this instinct into a sustained discipline of disagreement. The Talmud preserves minority opinions alongside majority rulings, not as historical curiosities but as enduring participants in the conversation. A legal conclusion does not erase dissenting reasoning; it remains part of the tradition itself. The lesson is subtle but profound, genuine clarity does not always require unanimity, and wisdom does not always require premature closure.

This reflects a deeper moral intuition. To judge is to compress the complexity of reality into a claim about what something is. Yet human beings are rarely exhausted by what can be immediately seen or heard. A single action may carry multiple meanings, and a single moment may belong to a story that is not yet visible. Premature judgment collapses that complexity into simplicity, not because reality is simple, but because the mind naturally prefers resolution to uncertainty.

It is in this light that Pirkei Avot counsels, “Do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place” (2:4). The teaching does not assume that such a place can ever be fully reached. Its force lies precisely in recognizing that another person’s inner world, history, and circumstances always exceed what is available to the observer. The point is not that judgment must await perfect knowledge—an impossible standard—but that every judgment should remain conscious of what it cannot know. Humility, in this sense, is not the abandonment of judgment but the recognition of its limits.

This humility also finds practical expression in the rabbinic ideal of dan l’kaf zekhut, judging others favorably. The teaching does not require ignoring wrongdoing or abandoning moral discernment; rather, it counsels that, when motives or circumstances remain uncertain, charity should precede condemnation. The point is not naïve optimism but humility: when the available evidence permits more than one interpretation, justice is often better served by resisting the impulse toward the harshest conclusion. Favorable judgment thus becomes another form of disciplined restraint, reminding us that uncertainty should invite humility before it invites accusation.

Jewish thought extends this humility beyond favorable judgment to the relationship between justice and mercy itself. Rabbinic tradition speaks of middat ha-din, the attribute of justice, alongside middat ha-rachamim, the attribute of mercy. These are not competing moral systems but complementary ones. Because human beings never possess G-d’s perfect knowledge, justice itself requires humility. Mercy does not suspend moral judgment; it acknowledges the limits under which all human judgment is rendered. Justice without mercy risks mistaking limited human knowledge for complete understanding, while mercy without justice dissolves moral accountability. Proper judgment therefore requires both the courage to discern and the humility to recognize that every human verdict remains necessarily incomplete.

This challenge is intensified by the architecture of contemporary communication. Digital platforms organize attention around immediacy, leaving little space between event and interpretation. In this narrowing interval, judgment increasingly replaces understanding rather than following from it. What is lost is not only accuracy but patience, the willingness to remain temporarily undecided while facts and meanings emerge.

Jewish thought does not call for the abandonment of judgment. It insists, rather, on its proper timing. There are moments when failure to judge becomes complicity, when injustice demands clarity rather than hesitation. Courts must decide. Communities must act. Silence is not always a virtue. Yet this necessity does not negate the opposite danger, that judgment rendered too quickly may itself become a form of injustice. Justice requires decisiveness, but it also requires the humility to recognize that every human judgment is necessarily incomplete.

To withhold judgment, then, is not moral indifference. It is moral discipline. It acknowledges that the human mind is capable of error not only in what it concludes but in how quickly it concludes. Jewish thought does not ask us to abandon judgment, but to order it rightly, to allow understanding to precede certainty and humility to accompany conviction. Before we decide what another person, event, or moment ultimately means, we must first grant reality the time to disclose itself.

A just society is therefore not one that judges least, but one that has learned that justice sometimes begins by waiting. Every human life contains more than any single moment reveals. The refusal to rush toward certainty is one of the quiet ways we honor the dignity of another person. Ecclesiastes teaches that there is a time for everything, Jewish tradition reminds us that judgment has its proper season as well. Wisdom lies not only in knowing what is true, but in knowing when the time has come to render judgment.

Dear Vice President Vance,

You’ve lived an accomplished life, rising from a difficult childhood in a poor Ohio home, through the Marine Corps to Yale, and then into a fortune in venture capital. Along the way you wrote your bestselling memoir and became the vice president of the United States. You accomplished all of this in just 40 years.

Semper fi, sir! 

I, too, am a Marine, and, in light of your recent comments on the Joe Rogan show, I’d like to reply, Marine to Marine.

You referred to a Time Magazine article that claimed Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, runs an Israeli influence operation inside the United States. Apparently the global ad agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm on behalf of Israel. Time reported that a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filing supports this claim. According to the article, this campaign does not exist to undermine the Trump administration, but to “keep young conservatives from drifting away from supporting Israel.”

The suggestion that Israel conduct a campaign to regain support among young Americans, particularly young conservatives, actually came from your late, close friend, Charlie Kirk. If the Israeli government is taking Charlie Kirk’s advice, good for them. It was good advice.

When you talked to Rogan, you let the specter of ill intent sit like a fog in the air. In reality, there is nothing wrong with Israel, or Israeli citizens, or Israeli companies supporting American influencers with whom they may agree. You also speculated that Jeffrey Epstein was deeply connected to Israeli intelligence, while admitting you have no evidence of that, and then you pivoted immediately to the Iran war and the peace negotiations with which you engaged with the Islamic regime occupying that country.

Jeffrey Epstein died on August 10, 2019; that’s almost seven years ago—predating the current war with Iran’s Islamic regime, the bombing of its nuclear facilities, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel that precipitated the Gaza war and the larger regional conflict that followed. What Jeffrey Epstein did was horrific, but it has nothing to do with the war with Islamic regime, and you had no reason to bring it up in that context.

Frankly, your use of it sounded like an anti-Israel smear. There is also the question of intent: what, exactly, were you, the sitting vice president, a man with a schedule of considerably more trying tasks upon your shoulders—sorting out America’s welfare fraud catastrophe most prominent among them—trying to accomplish on the Joe Rogan show spreading what, by all accounts, looked like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? That is not an accusation, but it is a request for clarification. The American public needs to know if you are standing with our ally, or sliding into the alt-right.

The worst thing is that you were not even clear about what, specifically, you were blaming Israel for doing wrong. The closest you came was saying,

What bothers me is actually when Americans allow—meaning American leadership—allows that [Israeli] influence to affect their judgment, and to affect what they are advocating for. That’s what really bothers me. People are always going to try to influence the United States of America, whether they are allies of ours, or whether they’re enemies of ours; but again, when I open up the pages of Time Magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign, being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing—and, oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving the money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways—do you know, my response to that is, well, “Go to hell.”

You are correct that many countries try to influence the United States, just as we try to influence other countries. We live in a country that believes in free speech, so this is the norm. You are also correct that you should not be attacked personally for negotiating, on the president’s behalf, with the terrorist junta ruling Iran.

But let us talk about those negotiations.

Negotiations require two things to be successful: an agreement must be possible, and all parties must be negotiating in good faith. With the current regime occupying Iran, I don’t think either of those conditions are true, and it is very likely that giving it breathing space lengthened the war. 

More to the point, Israel has been proven correct in saying Iran is not a trustworthy negotiating partner. We are bombing regime targets (again) after its forces attacked commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, in violation of the memorandum’s safe-passage provisions, and now President Trump has made it clear that further negotiations with the current regime leadership would be a waste of time. Even more importantly, the Mossad—the same agency for which you allege Jeffrey Epstein was working as a spy and blackmail operative (without one atom of evidence worth three seconds of a judge or prosecutor’s time)—recently uncovered yet another IRGC plot to assassinate President Trump while he was in Turkey. Shouldn’t you be happy that American leadership listens when a foreign government is right—particularly when it just saved your boss’s life?

Free speech exists so we can debate ideas in the open, and the simple truth here is that Israel was right and you were wrong.

I’m sure Israel is funding influencers. Not only did Charlie Kirk encourage them to do so, but it is in their best interest to do so. Also, I’d like you to consider the hypocrisy of going to Munich and lecturing the Europeans about free speech and then turning around and criticizing Israel for financing those exercising it here.

What is truly troubling is not that you devoted so much attention to Israel while ignoring the far more extensive influence operations conducted by China and Qatar, both of whom fund not only influencers but also universities and media outlets. Qatar in particular spends billions of dollars a year on media, lobbying efforts, universities, and other forms of influence, and somehow you said nothing about that. You also said nothing about all the Islamic regime’s propaganda flooding social media. I’ve lost count of the number of times they have supposedly sunk the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford.

Qatar is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. It has hosted Brotherhood leaders, supported Brotherhood-aligned governments and organizations, and used its state-funded media outlet, Al Jazeera, to amplify their influence. An internal 1991 memorandum written by Mohamed Akram, a senior figure in the Brotherhood’s American network, described its work in the United States as a long-term “civilization-jihadist process” intended to undermine Western society from within through religious, civic, educational, and political institutions. Federal prosecutors later introduced the document as evidence in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case. 

Why are you so focused on Israeli influence when influential Muslim Brotherhood organizers have been so explicit about their long-term ambitions in the United States? You were on Joe Rogan’s show for three hours. Couldn’t you have mentioned any influence campaign other than the one your close friend encouraged Israel to undertake?

The Islamic regime in Iran is increasingly isolated. While many Arab governments continue to criticize Israeli policies, they have also come to view their neighbor’s regional ambitions, ballistic missile program, and network of proxy militias as a far greater strategic threat. They are also increasingly tying themselves economically to Israel, including by buying Israeli defense materials.

The Middle East conflict is no longer Arabs versus Jews. Increasingly, it is Israel and its Sunni neighbors against an expansionist Shi’ite regime across the Strait. Once the Islamic Republic of Iran falls, so, too, eventually will its proxy forces, and suddenly peace—or, perhaps, less war—in the Middle East will move from dream to achievable reality.

That regime must fall, and I implore your support for the continued operations to ensure that this happens. The Islamic Republic of Iran can never have a nuclear bomb.

My concern is not that you criticized Israel. Allies disagree all the time. My concern is that you gave public credibility to a narrative that has become central to the American isolationist movement: that Israel manipulates the United States into wars against its own interests. Stopping the Islamic regime from getting a nuclear bomb is our war, too. Once a vice president begins lending credibility to claims for which he admits he has no evidence, that narrative acquires a legitimacy it has not earned.

Your friend Charlie Kirk believed Israel needed to make its case to young American conservatives. Now you are treating Israel’s decision to follow that advice as evidence of something sinister.

Israel has been and continues to be one of the United States’ most important allies. What’s more, they continue to be our friend. Positioning yourself in a way that captures the anti-Israel sentiment creeping into the fringes of the Republican Party also makes you look like a politician who is willing to run against his friends for political advantage, and anyone who will turn on a friend for votes deserves neither friends nor votes.

Thank you for your time, sir, and semper fi,

Wallace L. Garneau

I. The Insufficiency of Moral Perfectionism

Modern political discourse frequently laments the decay of civic virtue, offering a familiar remedy: a return to positive moral frameworks. Commentators and theorists look to classical philosophy—from Aristotelian teleology to Stoic cosmopolitanism—to revive a shared vision of the good life. While these frameworks are invaluable for individual self-governance, relying on them to stabilize a fractured democratic state is a structural error. In a sprawling, pluralistic society, a universal positive morality cannot be engineered without state coercion, nor can a busy populace be expected to uniformly prioritize abstract virtue over material survival.

A free society is stabilized not by a shared vision of what is positive, but by a collective agreement on what is intolerable.Cohesion must be anchored in a consensus on the intolerable—not what a populace collectively aspires to achieve, but what it collectively refuses to endure.

II. The Constitutional Vacuum: Negative Liberty and Atomization

The American project was deliberately constructed on a foundation of negative liberties—constitutional mechanisms designed, in the tradition of John Locke, to restrict state apparatuses from infringing upon the foundational tenets of liberty and equality. This structure maximizes individual autonomy by creating a legal vacuum where the state remains officially neutral. However, this architectural choice introduces a profound sociological vulnerability. When individuals misinterpret freedom from state intervention as an entitlement to total freedom from social consequence, the civic compact begins to fracture.

As Edmund Burke famously observed, a society cannot be sustained by legal mechanics alone; it requires the robust moral fabric of civil society—the voluntary, non-governmental institutions and associations—to preserve order. Without this cultural baseline, liberty is quickly misread as a license for atomized self-interest, systemic bigotry, and the deliberate erosion of democratic norms. The state can legally guarantee the right to expression, but it cannot prevent that expression from turning toxic.

III. The Philosophical Pivot: The Consensus on the Intolerable

This constitutional vacuum demands a sharp delineation of what constitutes the intolerable. To ensure this social boundary is not weaponized for partisan censorship or mere ideological disagreement, the baseline must be defined with strict clinical precision: the intolerable boundary is breached only when speech or action explicitly and directly challenges, threatens, or violates our core foundational values of liberty and equality.

Specifically, this boundary manifests as two universal moral taboos: overt, eliminationist bigotry and the endorsement of extra-judicial violence. Eliminationist rhetoric—speech that denies the fundamental human rights or the very right to exist of a protected group—and the sanctioning of violence outside the rule of law are not merely inflammatory opinions. They are systemic vectors of destruction designed to collapse the pluralistic framework entirely.

This framework finds its philosophical validation in Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Popper posited that if a society is tolerant without limit, its capacity for tolerance is ultimately subverted and destroyed by the intolerant. Therefore, to maintain a liberal framework, society must claim the right to be intolerant of intolerance. When public speech or collective action crosses from heterodox opinion into these universal taboos, it becomes an asymmetric assault on the very civic playground that permits free expression to exist. It ceases to be an exercise of liberty.

What unites a fragmented populace is not a shared religious or moral destination, but the collective defense of the perimeter. The ultimate civic virtue in a free society is paradoxically a negative value: an aggressive, uncompromising intolerance toward behaviors that seek to normalize the destruction of the civic compact.

IV. Civil Society as the Immune System

The preservation of this consensus requires a strict demarcation between the apparatus of the state and the mechanisms of culture. Because the legal architecture must protect negative liberties, the state is constitutionally barred from policing these cultural boundaries; it cannot, and should not, arbitrate acceptable social behavior beyond the enforcement of codified law. Therefore, the burden of defense falls entirely upon civil society.

Civil society must function as the decentralized immune system of a free nation. While the state remains legally neutral, the citizenry cannot remain culturally indifferent. When illiberal actors exploit negative liberties to normalize hate or erode democratic norms, civil society must deploy its own non-governmental defense mechanisms. These include reputational boundary-setting, economic dissociation, social ostracism, and the vocal rejection of destructive ideologies.

Crucially, this cultural enforcement must be decentralized and organic, distinguishing itself entirely from the modern impulses of institutional “cancellation” or partisan mob rule. True civil guardrails are not designed to enforce ideological conformity, police minor linguistic infractions, or eliminate political dissent. Rather, they protect the multi-partisan arena itself. When a society weaponizes social pressure to punish mere heterodoxy, it replicates the very illiberalism it claims to fight. The immune response must be strictly calibrated: it must remain blind to ideological factions, deploying its defensive power solely against actions that threaten the survival of liberty and equality.

This is not an infringement on liberty, but the cost of its maintenance. Freedom of speech ensures that the state cannot jail the demagogue; it does not ensure that civil society must provide him with an audience, a platform, or social legitimacy. If the American project is to survive its current fractures, it will not be because a busy populace suddenly masters classical virtue. It will be because everyday citizens assume their roles as the true guardians of liberty—collectively enforcing the guardrails necessary to suppress the forces of decay before they achieve normalization.

How so! I plunge, plunge without fail
My blood-black saber into your soul.
That art God neither wants nor wits,
It leaps to the brain from Hell’s black mists.
Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.

—Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Yes—he was also a poet.

Was Marx actually a Satanist? Some might say he was just a romantic youth, and it is hard to say one way or another with absolute certainty, but whether or not Marx literally worshiped Satan, his imagination was satanic in the older Christian sense: rebellion against God, hatred of the created order, and the promise that man can become his own creator. He certainly saw man the way Satan would, offering something Satan would have known could never actually work while knowing that the attempt to implement it would kill on a scale even smallpox could not match.

“Real communism has never been tried” is the familiar refrain, but that is because real communism is not possible. Every attempt at it has stalled out in the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” stage, and that will always be true as self-interest cannot be abolished. It can only be punished, starved, terrorized, and driven underground.

Here is another verse Marx wrote:

Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it well.
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.

Communism promises freedom from want in a utopian paradise of plenty, but people are not wired to work like bees or ants, and, as a result, all communism delivers is starvation and depravity.

Marx called religion “an opiate for the masses,” but this quote is seldom understood. Marx wanted the masses given their opiate, and communist countries tend to have the masses worship the communist leaders whenever the Dictatorship of the Proletariat emerges.

Lenin was worshiped like a god after his death, and Stalin understood something Trotsky never fully grasped. Trotsky wanted the communist revolution worshiped as an ideal. Stalin understood that the Soviet people, having been severed from God and told to worship their former emperors as His chief earthly intermediaries for centuries before, needed a god in the image of man. Lenin became the icon, and Stalin the successor.

Communists called themselves “atheists,” even if they were never in practice, and Lenin was not satisfied just burning down churches. He jailed priests with prostitutes and forced nuns to take husbands to break their vows.

Here is another verse from Marx:

Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle.
Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think.
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

Here is another:

The world which bulks between me and the Abyss,
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality:
Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
And then sink down to utter nothingness,
Perished, with no existence—that would be really living!

Marx gives the same basic argument to all of mankind that the serpent gave to Adam and Eve, telling us that if we renounce religion and rebuild society in Marx’s image we will be akin to God ourselves, at least collectively speaking. Is it really a surprise that everyone who has ever led a Marxist revolution, then, has turned out to be a sadistic monster?

Here is the thing: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is not how one treats free people. It is how one treats livestock. Marx’s vision was to reduce people to farm animals, feeding and housing them while expecting them to work “for the collective” until they drop from exhaustion. If we are to take Marx at his word, it may well be that he wrote Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto specifically to see the world destroyed, knowing that evil hands hell-bent on man’s destruction would flock to his siren call and smash their countries upon Marxism’s rocks. 

It is the conceit of man that we think we know more, and that others know less. Give someone a title and this problem grows exponentially. Give someone a system nobody has ever managed to implement before, and those with lofty titles will think they and they alone can make it work.

It is not hard to play on the ego of youth either. They are told that the world has changed and that they, and not their forebears, can make socialism work. Wisdom, after all, is the appreciation of what limited knowledge we have, and wisdom comes with age. The youth have little wisdom by virtue of being young, and it is easy to convince those who are unwise that they are smarter than those who came before. 

A wise person would not think they can improve a complicated system like our electricity grid or our food distribution system without first taking the time to become an expert in those systems. A wise person would understand what they do not know, but those with an overabundance of ego have no limits to what they imagine they can do.

It is not just Marx. New York City just put Zohran Mamdani in as mayor, and democratic socialists are winning Democratic primary after Democratic primary across the country. “We are not communists,” such people say, “we are democratic socialists,” but David Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, says that the goal of democratic socialism is “liberation and communism.”

Think of the ego Karl Marx must have had to think he could redesign the political and economic landscape of the entire world. Perhaps those who tried and who continue to try to implement Marx’s vision had good intentions, but I do not believe Marx did. I think Marx wanted to see the world burn, as much of it did in the twentieth century. Marx even told us he wanted the world to burn. Just read his poetry.

Did the world learn its lesson from all the carnage in the last century? No. Sadly, each generation seems to want to learn this lesson the hard way, which will likely make this century even bloodier, and the quest for Marxism will turn the world into the devil’s playhouse, if given the opportunity.

Marxists never refer to Marxism as a movement, but as a revolution. There is a reason for that. Movements have a start and an end in which something moves a certain distance and then stops. A revolution is perpetual, moving so far and then revolving over again as something else. Marxist revolutions are continuous. 

The people living in communism are in a perpetual state of fear and hunger. Every time the people start to get used to it, it revolves again as something else. Marx and Engels supplied the phrase “permanent revolution” and Trotsky later turned it into doctrine. The result is not liberation, but a living hell on Earth made permanent, devouring each subsequent generation. 

It was not enough for Marx to damn those alive during his lifetime. In the logic of satanic rebellion, Marx wanted to damn everyone who ever would live, for all time to come. Marxism is not a faith for the humble, though. It is a faith for those who believe man can be redesigned, society can be remade, history can be commanded, and God can be replaced. 

If we look at what Satan would need to destroy God’s creation, he would actually need two systems: one for those with the humility for faith, and one for those with the vanity to deny a higher power. Both would, of course, pervert God’s moral law. I’ve written before how Muhammad supplied the system for the faithful. Marx supplied one for the arrogant.

Do you remember, in the days of yore, when an Irishman happily served as the President of Israel for a decade? Chaim Herzog, born in Belfast, raised in Dublin, was Israeli President from 1983 to 1993. Since then, Israel-Ireland relations have become, shall we say, rather dodgy.

The Irish population has been increasingly outspoken in their anti-Semitism, accusing Israel of apartheid, occupation, orchestrated famine, and genocide. Medieval blood libels circulate anew throughout the Emerald Isle even though there are far fewer wells to poison in these modern times. Of course with social media, the more outrageous the claim the more quickly it spreads. As of yet, Israel has successfully sidestepped blame for global warming, but who knows what the next accusations will be.

Never do we see marches or rallies in Belfast related to the horrors in Sudan, which is undergoing a true genocide and a real famine (approximately 400,000 dead from violence and starvation in the last five years). No one seems to care. Well, at least no one in Ireland seems to care. Similarly, never do we see angry mobs on the streets of Dublin protesting Putin’s unprovoked and seemingly flippant decision to invade Ukraine, causing the deaths of at least 120,000 people so far as Russian drones target infrastructure and residential apartment buildings. No Russians flags are burnt on the streets of Dublin as one would expect, given that Irish society is so sensitive and statedly appalled to all forms of perceived occupation and colonialism. 

The Kremlin’s egregious and Stalinesque attempt to destroy Ukrainian culture, history, and language, to fully absorb the territory into Mother Russia and erase it from world maps doesn’t seem to prompt any notable mass objection from the Irish. Colonialist intentions and occupation of land while imposing the rule of law doesn’t seem so reprehensible anymore, so perhaps the IRA will stand down after all these years of English Protestant rule over Belfast.

This seems a bafflement, but it is easily and simply explained. The fact is Russian occupation crimes and Sudanese atrocities neither feed nor satisfy the ravenous appetite for Jew hatred and cannot be connected to the currently widespread anti-Semitism within Irish society. Equating British control over Northern Ireland and an Israeli military presence in Judea and Samaria is not just easy propaganda for the willingly ignorant but intentional misinformation that is mass produced into convenient short phrasing that’s perfect for signage and repeated bullhorned chants.

Ireland was quick to join with the ICJ in accusing Israel of genocide. Ireland is advancing a bill to prohibit the importation of all products from territories it deems “occupied,” specifically what is referred to as the “West Bank” and East Jerusalem. In the wake of the October 7 Hamas invasion into Israel and their grotesque and barbaric murders, Ireland thought to reward these heinous acts by recognizing Palestine as a state. The fact that Hamas clearly and unashamedly announced its intention of genocide didn’t matter. The Irish government thought this would appease the residents of Gaza and the West Bank and therefore put an end to their violent ways. It is not unusual to see Palestinian flags displayed inside and outside of Irish restaurants and pubs. Over the years, Ireland has given approximately 400 million pounds and euros to Palestinian causes straight from the pockets of Irish taxpayers. There never seems to be any demand to see the accounting and usage of the funds.

Rarely has a Western Christian country been so blatantly anti-Israel. There are frequent protests outside of Israeli owned hotels in Dublin and Belfast. It is not illegal or controversial for an Irish band’s live concert performance to have signs that say “F*ck Israel” on the screen while the band members wave Hezbollah flags on stage and spew vitriolic rap that would make Nazi skinheads mosh, stomp, and bang their heads fiercely against the stage to the point of blissful concussion.

It would seem these are challenging times regarding Israeli and Irish diplomatic relations, what with the removal of ambassadors and the closing of an embassy. It seems the BDS efforts are doing their damage and the misinformed, uneducated, hateful, sign-wielding, marching, screaming, flag waving, traffic blocking, kilt- and keffiyeh-wearing protesters who don’t seem to be employed, have emerged victorious. Similar to a food co-op in Brooklyn, Belfast will be bereft of Bamba.

But even here, one must be reminded, these appear to be minor squabbles. While diplomacy is challenged and protests are pervasive, real business continues.

With all this tension, there are strong reasons for optimism. It’s encouraging to see substantial deals being done by mature companies who share a strong and hopeful vision of the future. A vision that will transform the important field of cancer treatment regardless of where the technology was developed. Cross border investment and partnerships to build that technology will impact lives for the better.

Last month, Tolmar Int’l LTD, a Dublin-based pharmaceutical company specializing in long- acting injectables in the urology and oncology fields has invested in and partnered with AlphaTau Medical, a Jerusalem-based Israeli medical device company that is developing injectable alpha particle radiation DaRTs for cancer therapy. Together they will market this non-invasive outpatient method for prostate cancer treatment that will hopefully ultimately replace the typical treatment protocols: surgery, chemotherapy, traditional radiation, or a combination thereof. These radioactive DaRTs are injected directly into the tumors, killing the tumors from within, with no damage to surrounding tissue. Patients can go home the same day with no real side effects.

Tolmar did their extensive due diligence and considered this a breakthrough. With the opportunity here for both technological advancement and commercialization, they invested $35 million now and committed up to $161 million if certain milestones are met.

It is reassuring that Israeli R&D, Israeli technologies, therapies, modalities, and patents will always bring pragmatic, carefully considered investment from any country regardless if anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, BDS traffic blockers need to be removed from the very same highway the management teams must drive on to get to the meeting to sign the investment documents.

So Ireland will lack good hummus from Israel, but sadly, I’m certain one day an unfortunate anti-Semite from Dublin will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and his commitment to boycott all products and services from Israel will be greatly tested. Let’s see if he’ll accept a highly effective, non-invasive, cheaper, outpatient method of treating it.

The Tolmar investment in AlphaTau is an example of rational, smart international collaboration and these deals will persist despite all the small-minded rhetoric and hatred simply because the opportunities for major advancement are too great. Israeli developments, innovation, and growth potential will continue to attract capital and it will ultimately squelch the attempts of BDS and its bullhorns.

Humans love violence and chaos. Leave us alone long enough, and we will find something to squabble about. That is why sports are so remarkable: instead of clubs, spears, or rifles, they let us settle differences and grievances in a (mostly) non-bloody way—except when we revert to our baser instincts and tribalism takes over, resulting in a sports riot.

Sports riots have existed for at least two millennia. One of the earliest well-documented examples is the Pompeii amphitheater riot of 59 C.E. It erupted during a gladiatorial show when local Pompeiian fans clashed with visiting supporters from nearby Nuceria. What began as typical taunts and insults escalated: verbal abuse gave way to stones, then to swords, and finally a full mêlée. Many Nucerians were killed or wounded.

The incident was so severe that the emperor Nero referred it to the Senate, which responded by banning gladiatorial games in Pompeii for 10 years. A famous fresco now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples captures the chaos, showing fans fighting in the stands and streets. As the historian Tacitus noted in his Annals (Book 14.17), it all stemmed from a “trifling incident”—a reminder of how little it can take to ignite a crowd.

But that was ancient Rome. Surely we are more civilized today?

As videos and photos of New Yorkers torching a school bus after a Knicks victory show, the answer is no.

The Psychology of Sports Riots

Rooting passionately through an entire season—or multiple seasons—builds intense internal pressure. Every cheer is tribal: us versus them, again and again. That is why it feels so personal—“We won!” or, conversely, “Those losers—I hate them.” Strong team identification boosts self-esteem in victory and threatens it in defeat. Sports serve as a stand-in for war or battle, but that same primal energy surges through us with every swing of the bat, kick of the ball, or slap of the puck.

Tribalism does something even more powerful: it de-individuates us. Much like military training strips away individual identity for the sake of the unit, cheering for your team merges your sense of self into the group. That is why you might hug a total stranger at a bar simply because they wear the same jersey as you after a game-winning home run (“Yankees suck!”).

Yet there is a dark side to this loss of self. In a crowd, people become more impulsive and disinhibited. You are far more likely to commit acts—vandalism, violence, destruction—that you would never do alone. Factors like alcohol (a major disinhibitor), emotional contagion (one person’s outburst spreading rapidly), and the anonymity of the mob amplify the risk. Add a predominance of young adult males, and the recipe for disaster is complete.

Riots remain the exception, not the rule—millions of fans enjoy games peacefully every year—but when conditions align (high stakes, large excited crowds, alcohol, and poor controls), the outcome can be ugly.

The Curious Pattern of North American Sports Riots

One of the strangest aspects of sports riots in North America is who typically starts them: the winners. There is something about the explosive release of championship energy that can turn modern humans into something more primal. Cities like Boston and Philadelphia are so accustomed to winning that fans joke about pre-planned “celebration preparations” (i.e., riot prep) before the final whistle. In Philly, officials grease light poles to deter climbers—yet fans always find a way.

One possible reason for this pattern is a broader societal undercurrent. In an era of intense political polarization—where people often seem at each other’s throats over the smallest slights—a sports riot can offer a socially sanctioned outlet for pent-up destructive energy. The 2020 George Floyd-Black Lives Matter protests and riots, which caused well over $2 billion in damages amid the stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic, were largely born of frustration and anger. North American sports riots differ: they are frequently celebratory explosions following victory rather than outlets for grievance.

Recent images from New York City, where Knicks fans celebrated by setting a school bus ablaze after defeating the Spurs, illustrate this perfectly. The winning side rioted; the losing side in San Antonio stayed quiet. This is the common North American pattern: winners celebrate destructively, while losers tend to sulk in relative silence.

Most people would expect the opposite—frustrated losers lashing out—but data and history show otherwise. 

When the Eagles beat the Patriots in Super Bowl LII (2018), Boston remained calm while Philadelphia erupted. In the 1990s, Chicago rioted repeatedly as Michael Jordan and the Bulls brought home NBA titles. One person died in the Detroit Tigers’ celebratory World Series riot in 1984. Montreal saw riots after the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup win in 1986. Eight people died in Detroit after the Pistons’ 1990 NBA title. There was even a shooting during the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory celebrations in 2024.

The major North American exception remains Vancouver’s 2011 Stanley Cup riot after the Canucks lost a heartbreaking Game 7 to the Boston Bruins. While sports rioting in the U.S. became more prominent starting in the 1980s, it is neither constant nor inevitable. Not every championship sparks chaos, but when it does, it is almost always the winning side letting loose.

So root hard for your team—but keep a bridle on that passion. The only thing worse than watching your team lose a championship is watching them win one from inside a jail cell.

I grew up in communist Prague in a family where both parents were Holocaust survivors. Both circumstances left marks on me. Living with parents who went through the Holocaust was difficult at times and my experience with communism added additional stress.

No, my parents did not end up in concentration camps; but spending time in hiding was traumatic, especially for my mother. She spoke very little about her and her family’s time in the mountains of Slovakia where they and other refugees were hunted by Nazi and Slovakian fascist troops aided by German shepherds, where they slept on snow, many times hungry and terrified that they did not have enough money so local peasants would not betray them. Only once she mentioned one atrocity: witnessing the murder of a baby ripped from the mother’s arms. But she did not have strength to finish the story.

My mom was marked for life—she panicked when seeing a dog, even a small one and on leash. She always worried when a family member was late and was ready to call the police after a few minutes of waiting. Today she would be diagnosed with PTSD. And perhaps that would go for my father as well: only 60 years after the war, he mentioned he lost an aunt and an uncle in a concentration camp—relatives of whom I have never heard before or after.

After their return home from mountains, my mom and her family were astonished that many people, especially those who actively collaborated with fascist authorities, never heard of the Holocaust; they were surprised that some Jews came back. My grandfather lost his business to “Aryanization,” the war-time theft of Jewish property by “Aryans.” He was able to recover it—until 1948, when it was nationalized by communists. Still, the family soon discovered that some of their remaining property, such as furniture, was looted and was standing in offices of former fascists who reinvented themselves into enthusiastic communists. My mom even noticed women walking in the streets wearing her dresses.

In 1971, my parents published a collection of stories about music and wartime Jewish experience, some based on my mother’s recollections. The book, called Song for the Day of Atonement, was immediately confiscated without a single word of explanation. I have always wondered, “Was it because of the Holocaust connection?” I never found out, but copies from the original and only edition are available in public libraries throughout post-communist Czechia.

As a small child, I heard my parents discussing who was Jewish—that was the most important information about a new acquaintance or friend. Israel was on their plate often, especially when somebody managed to emigrate or escape there. Otherwise, the Holocaust was mentioned, but not discussed in communist Czechoslovakia, though The Diary of Anne Frank was translated and read.

The famous Jewish Museum in Prague consisting of several old synagogues, including the Altneuschul and the old Jewish cemetery in the old Jewish quarter, was well preserved as a source of Western currency supplied by tourists, many of them from West Germany. The museum was filled with Jewish ritual items and memorabilia collected by Nazis for the purpose of establishing a museum of “decadent” culture. Theresienstadt was well maintained—the same tourists coming there as well.

My parents started taking us to a synagogue and the Jewish community center in 1967 when “socialism with a human face,” a slogan of the Prague Spring, was brewing to be born in January of 1968 and being extinguished by the Soviet invasion in August. After that, being Jewish and discussing the Holocaust became completely taboo for two more decades. In schools we were presented with three groups of enemies faced by communist countries: “American Imperialists,” “German Revanchists” (Germans expelled from the Sudetenland in 1945) and, yes, “Zionists”—we Jews! Israel was vilified and old people were not allowed to visit their relatives living in Israel they had not seen in decades. Jewish composers, such as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Gustav Mahler, were never performed. Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel—two Prague-born, German-speaking Jewish writers—were not published in new editions. But the tourists continued coming and the Jewish Museum stayed open.

I came to Canada in 1976. I was surprised by the vibrant and free Jewish life, which was a totally novel experience. Today I am surprised and dismayed by what’s happening in Canada with anti-Semitism spreading like wildfire and with the inaction of the Canadian government; and, until recently, I was grateful for moving to the U.S. some years ago. My gratitude went far, but not anymore. Anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda turns out to be a purely anti-Semitic enterprise and, together with total distortion and inversion of the Holocaust, has been spreading throughout the world and infecting the U.S. as well.

According to Warren Kinsella, the author of Digital Intifada, preparations by Hamas and associates to besmirch Israel with claims of crimes against Palestinians starting with the “Naqba” and culminating in accusations of “genocide” and portraying Israel and Jews as Nazis and Palestinians as their victims have been made for decades. Hamas, et al.—like their communist spy handlers before them—have hijacked and mastered infiltrating the Internet and social media, managing to manipulate unsuspecting, mostly young, people into buying into their lies. Constant exposure to false messages together with ignorance of history through messaging—X, TikTok, Twitch, and other sites—convinced people that Jews and Israel are evil.

After more than 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the Holocaust has become ancient history, especially with the number of Holocaust survivors rapidly declining and many people happy to hear that if Jews are genocidal then, perhaps, they deserved what they got.

And, perhaps, various European governments feel relieved from the guilt they have carried for their complicity in letting Jews perish, or at least not doing more to save them. We should not forget that, for the last two millennia, European history is tainted with widespread anti-Semitism. Jews were accused of deicide (the murder of Jesus), using the blood of Christian children in baking matzah, and in spreading the bubonic plague to list just the most outrageous claims. It is hard to shake off old habits.

In addition, the emergence of large and restless Muslim minorities in Europe pressures European governments into reprimands and sanctions of Israel. The absurdity of European actions appears nonsensical, but is, nevertheless, expanding. In times when anti-Israel protests are becoming more threatening and outrightly anti-Semitic, when Jews are called Nazis and Palestinians their victims, when the war in Gaza is called a “genocide” and compared to the Holocaust, the understanding of the real Holocaust is gone and Jews and their institutions and synagogues are attacked and subjected to physical abuse and destruction on the streets of European and Canadian cities.

You would think that leaders of those countries and E.U. would strongly come against these hate crimes, but, no, they don’t. There is silence, limited police actions, or worthless proclamations by some officials that these hate crimes are “not acceptable.” None of this is followed by action, only by silence. Pro-Hamas protesters are allowed to roam free, defended by authorities as “free speech.” That Jews are afraid to walk on the streets of London, Amsterdam, Toronto, and even New York is becoming normal. Authorities are either afraid to interfere, or they tacitly approve of increasingly more violent activity. Not many politicians and leaders feel threatened by such attacks and are more interested in keeping Islamists as their voters.

Some European countries found a scapegoat for their problems identified by pro-Hamas mobs—Israel. The most recent example is the demand by France and the U.K. for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon. The French Foreign Minister requested a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting to stop Israel’s defensive activity in Lebanon. One would suggest that France should condemn Hezbollah for its aggression against Israel rather than playing “benevolent” neo-colonialist in Lebanon, its former colony. The Italian premiere Giorgia Meloni, together with other European leaders, is calling out Israel for mistreatment of members of the most recent Gaza flotilla, that these people are entitled “human dignity.” It did not cross her mind that the flotilla people had no respect for Israelis and were only interested in anti-Israel propaganda (while having sex and doing drugs). It did not occur to her that Jews attacked in or expelled from Italian establishments and a gay Jewish group chased out of a pride parade in Rome also deserve protection and acknowledgement of their human dignity.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he appointed a Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion to combat anti-Semitism. It sounds nice until one notices who the members are—at least one of them is a Muslim apologist for terrorist organizations. I think that I know what this council will advise to fight: “Islamophobia.” Does his declaration that the measures, as reported in the Canadian Jewish News, do not mean “curtailing freedom of expression” and “are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere” imply that the anti-Israel protests may continue and may include harassment of people living in predominantly Jewish residential areas of Toronto and other Canadian cities and will be still be considered “free speech?”

Unfortunately, current events in the U.S. do not promise good outcomes either. Violent protests near synagogues, particularly in New York City, intend to raise fear in congregants and discourage them from organizing and attending events about Israel. This is also called “free speech.”

What is even more worrisome is that not only many candidates, mostly on the Democratic side, running for Congress in midterm elections are either disavowing Israel and even expressing anti-Semitic views, but that they are supported by vile anti-Semites, such as Hasan Piker. And what is even more ominous is that they are endorsed by mainstream members of Congress, such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and the less mainstream but vocal and influential Bernie Sanders.

These supporters are deceiving themselves by acknowledging that though some of these candidates are problematic (e.g., Graham Platner) but insisting that election of these candidates is vital to turn the Congress Democratic. I am not very optimistic, especially if people are constantly exposed to people like Hasan Piker and Tucker Carlson (and many more). Why the New York Times serving as a platform for these people is unclear to me.

This might be good time for Jewish voters who, for the most part vote, traditionally for Democratic hopefuls to switch sides or at least not vote for certain candidates. We need to hope that voters know better than our current Democratic senators and representatives and will use their sechel (sixth sense).

Dallas • World Cup • Children • Visibility • WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM

The first banner went up quietly. Strategically. Outside Houston. The next one will not.

On May 29, the same soccer mural that rose outside Houston rose again.

Dallas, Texas. The same children. The same soccer field. The same cry. Only louder.

The first installation moved carefully. This one intends to make noise.

Because, after years of watching Iranian women beaten, imprisoned, silenced, and killed while demanding freedom—after watching men stand beside them and lose freedom and life—the world keeps scrolling.

The world keeps moving. The world keeps forgetting. So this movement asks a painful question:

What finally forces people to look? The heartbreaking hope behind this next installation is brutally simple: If the world will not stop for women—perhaps it will stop for children.

That is what this banner represents.

Children.

Children who should still be alive.

Children who should still be laughing.

Children who should still be playing soccer.

Children who never made it home.

Children buried beneath headlines.

Children buried beneath politics.

Children buried beneath indifference.

At the center stands soccer. Because soccer belongs to the world.

And the world is coming to America. The World Cup is coming. Billions of eyes will turn toward stadiums. Toward trophies. Toward players. Toward competition. Toward entertainment.

This movement asks:

Can those same eyes also see forgotten children? The Dallas installation is not intended to stay in Dallas. The dream is bigger.

Walls donated across America. Billboards. Buildings. Public spaces.

Communities saying:

“Put it here. Put it where people cannot avoid it. Put it where people must stop. Put it where people must ask questions.Put it where people cannot scroll away.”

And standing intentionally at the center of that challenge is President Donald J. Trump.

Directly. Intentionally. Without apology. The banner places him there because this movement is making a direct appeal.

Mr. President, see these children. Stand beside these children. Help America see these children.

Help the world see these children. Anyone who knows President Trump—send this to him.

Show him. Put it in front of him. Force him to look. Because maybe—just maybe—if enough people refuse to look away—leaders with influence will refuse to look away, too.

The hope is direct.

The hope is loud.

The hope is unapologetic.

The hope is that President Trump stands beside this banner. Photographs it. Posts it. Forces millions across the planet to see children they otherwise never would have seen.

The banner identifies President Trump symbolically as the recipient of a FIFA Peace Prize because peace is not merely treaties.

Peace is not merely negotiations.

Peace is whether children live.

Peace is whether children are protected.

Peace is whether innocent lives become visible.

As the World Cup comes to America, another difficult question emerges. Who gets remembered? And who gets erased?

Reports surrounding FIFA and restrictions involving displays of Iran’s Lion and Sun imagery have ignited major debate.

For many Iranians, the Lion and Sun is not politics.

It is memory.

Identity.

History.

Civilization.

A people older than a government.

A people older than a regime.

So another question emerges:

Can the world’s game make room for memory? Can soccer become bigger than entertainment? Can it become witness?Can it become conscience?

Dallas does not intend to whisper. Dallas intends to speak loudly. Dallas intends to ask uncomfortable questions. Dallas intends to force attention.

The first banner moved quietly. The second one does not. Because silence has lasted long enough.

Because children matter.

Because memory matters.

Because indifference kills.

Before politics.

Before arguments.

Before ideology.

They were children. And they deserve to be seen.

On March 26, 2026, Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old Barcelonan woman rendered a paraplegic after throwing herself from a care home window after having been gang raped twice by migrants, died by euthanasia after her father’s legal challenges failed. Her case passed through Spanish courts and reached the European Court of Human Rights. It was private, medical, legal, and familial all at once. That is why this matters.

Once the intentional ending of life is admitted into medicine under legal permission, the question does not remain confined to individual choice. The deeper question is what happens to institutions after they are given permission to make death part of care: how medicine begins to speak, how law classifies, how families imagine duty, and how quickly an exceptional act becomes normal.

I come to this question from more than theory. Mental illness in my family meant hospital corridors and the kind of vigilance that makes night feel unsafe. I have known people who wanted to die and later turned back toward life. I live with chronic illness myself, and I have cared for people with cancer. I have also seen palliative medicine relieve suffering without turning care into haste.

I have lived and worked in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, three societies that speak about suffering in different moral languages. Canada legalized medical assistance in dying and then widened it. The United Kingdom has not legalized assisted death, yet its courts have assumed major authority in end-of-life conflicts. Japan has no legal regime for assisted dying and remains, at least clinically, more committed to preserving life. Yet Japan has faced the same pressure in another form: the temptation to see dependent life through burden and utility.

In 2016, in Sagamihara, a former care worker murdered 19 severely disabled residents and claimed that lives like theirs were burdens without whom society would be better off. Japan condemned the act as murder. Sagamihara is not an analogue for assisted-dying law. It is a warning about a more primitive moral reflex: the temptation to see dependent life as a burden before seeing it as a life. In later debates about euthanasia, caregiving, and the strain of an aging society, more decorous versions of the same question recur: what becomes of lives marked by dependence and prolonged care when a society grows tired of carrying them?

These situations differ sharply, yet they gather around one difficulty: how modern societies treat vulnerability when it becomes costly, dependent, or hard to bear. I am less interested here in the dramatic case that dominates headlines than in the slower change beneath it. Institutions rarely announce that they are changing their nature. The shift arrives through routine such as revised forms, new protocols, and softer, more diplomatic phrases. What once seemed exceptional becomes administratively legible, then familiar, with unexpected speed.

Care and Killing

The first distinction should be stated plainly: palliative care and assisted dying are not the same kind of act.

Palliative medicine works within the fact that a person is dying. Its task is to relieve suffering and accompany the patient and family through the final stretch of life. Medication may carry risk. A person may die sooner than he or she otherwise would have. Even so, the physician foresees death without pursuing it.

Assisted dying has a different structure. Whether a doctor administers the lethal substance or provides it for self-administration, the act is ordered toward death. The intended result is the patient’s death.

This may sound technical, but the distinction belongs to the moral logic of medicine. Withdrawal of burdensome treatment, lethal injection, and allowing disease to run its course are not morally interchangeable acts. Language matters here because the actions differ.

Once assisted dying is legalized, the doctor’s role changes with it. Medicine is no longer confined to easing suffering within life. Under law, it acquires a second power. Eligibility then has to be assessed through diagnosis, capacity, consent, and judgment about suffering. Safeguards are meant to prevent abuse and haste, which is understandable given that the profession is now being asked to do something medicine did not previously authorize. The doctor must decide whether this person, in these circumstances, has reached the point at which death may properly be provided.

Supporters speak of compassion, often sincerely. A patient may be suffering badly, relief may seem impossible, and helping the person die can appear merciful. I do not doubt that pity is often real.

The larger change begins when a profession receives legal authority to end life as part of its work. That authority enters training, guidelines, reports, and conversations with patients. It alters what doctors understand their vocation to include. It also changes what patients hear when they imagine their future, and what families come to regard as reasonable. The law comes first, and the meaning of care shifts after it.

Canada and the Logic of Expansion

Canada shows this process with unusual clarity. The constitutional and legislative path from Carter v. Canadato the later widening of “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) has been described many times. The pattern matters more than the chronology. When the practice entered Canadian law in 2016, the eligibility rules were narrower. A competent adult had to be suffering intolerably, and natural death had to be “reasonably foreseeable.” Mental illness on its own was excluded.

In 2021, Parliament removed the “reasonably foreseeable” requirement and created two tracks. Access widened to include people who were not dying. The next line of expansion concerned those whose sole underlying condition was mental illness, though implementation was later delayed.

This did not arrive with fanfare. The language stayed calm, and public reasoning leaned on fairness, dignity, compassion, and constitutional consistency. The tone was measured, but the movement was real.

Over time, the exceptional loses its edge. Criteria are repeated often enough to feel natural. Documentation gives the practice weight. Assisted death begins to sound less like a rupture than one possible answer to suffering. The softer words help: one finds often in the arguments that promote the assisted death words such as assistance, dignity, relief, and mercy.

My point is simple. Once the law grants permission, a healthcare system can make room for intentional death with surprising speed. The deeper change is harder to locate. It begins before a law is invoked, in the patient’s anticipation, in the family’s fatigue, in the doctor’s sense of what can now be said aloud. Assisted death enters the range of thinkable options. After that, the central struggle is less about whether medicine may end life than about which cases count.

Spain sharpens the same point in a different legal setting. Organic Law 3/2021 legalized euthanasia under specified conditions, but one detail matters especially here. The law provides that death resulting from the “help to die” procedure shall be treated as a natural death for all legal purposes. That is more than administrative housekeeping. It shows how quickly law can move from permission to classification, and how language can help a deliberate ending of life pass into the ordinary categories of medicine and record.

The Spanish framework also shows how procedure normalizes what once stood outside medicine. Requests move through application, assessment, and review by the regional Commission of Guarantee and Evaluation. The act is made legible and verifiable within a clinical framework.

Castillo’s case made this visible. She had a history of psychiatric suffering, became paraplegic after a 2022 suicide attempt correlating with being raped repeatedly, and argued publicly that her suffering had become intolerable. The difficulty of her case should not be minimized. Her advocates could reasonably argue that her suffering was real, that her request was sustained, and that the law owed her the dignity of taking her stated will seriously. That is precisely why the case is valid. It does not present the crude image of coercion, but the harder modern form: a tragic, legally competent request moving through institutions increasingly trained to make death procedurally available.

Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the institutional form is striking: family resistance, medical approval, judicial review, and a lawful death came together inside a recognized clinical process.

Spain is not Canada, and its path is different. But it reveals another part of the same pattern. Once intentional death is legalized, it does not remain an exception floating above the system. It acquires offices, forms, review bodies, phrases, training, and eventually a place in ordinary professional expectation.

Britain and the Authority to Decide

Britain took a different route, but it belongs in the same discussion. The United Kingdom has not legalized assisted dying, and its end-of-life jurisprudence should not be collapsed into euthanasia. Its relevance lies in a narrower point: when patients lack capacity, the authority to decide whether life-sustaining treatment continues may move from family to court, hospital, and expert evidence.

In English law, when a patient lacks capacity, treatment decisions fall under the “best interests” test in the Mental Capacity Act (2005). In disputed cases, the Court of Protection may decide. When children are involved, similar conflicts can go to the Family Division of the High Court. The NHS states the matter plainly: if parents and clinicians cannot agree, the courts may determine what serves the child’s best interests.

That may sound procedural, but it is also a statement about where final authority lies. A hospital that judges continued treatment futile or harmful may ask the court to authorize withdrawal or limitation of life-sustaining intervention. This is now a recognized path in serious end-of-life disputes.

This belongs to a different legal category from euthanasia. The state is not authorizing a lethal injection. The legal description remains withdrawal of treatment and the allowance of death. Still, when a family faces the possible death of a child or incapacitated relative, that distinction does not remove the institutional fact. Final authority may no longer rest with them.

The case law traces the development. In Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland (1993), the House of Lords allowed artificial nutrition and hydration to be withdrawn from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. Feeding and hydration was treated as medical treatment, open to judgment, rather than as an unconditional duty. Active euthanasia remained prohibited. Yet the law had already assumed the power to say that continued life-sustaining measures could run against welfare.

In Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust v. James (2013), the U.K. Supreme Court sharpened the point. The question was whether continuing treatment served the patient’s best interests when the patient lacked capacity. Treatment had to justify itself.

The Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans cases (2017 and ’18) made this visible to the public. Hospitals argued that continued intervention offered no real prospect of improvement and risked prolonging suffering. Parents wanted treatment continued and searched elsewhere for options. The courts applied the best-interests standard and sided with the hospitals. Archie Battersbee’s case (2022) showed the same pattern under even more prolonged strain. After repeated appeals and international attention, the courts reaffirmed their authority to decide whether life-sustaining treatment would continue.

The language of protection does important work. “Best interests” is the law’s attempt to act for someone who cannot decide, and I take that claim seriously. The same language also confers power. The court stands in the place of the patient and decides what counts as welfare.

That transfer is significant. Parental love, faith, hope, and moral conviction remain present, but they no longer settle the case. They are translated into institutional categories such as evidence, benefit, burden, proportionality, and welfare.

The issue here is the scope of the authority now being exercised. A mechanism built in the name of protection has come to include the power to decide when continued life-sustaining treatment should stop.

Canada and Britain proceed by different legal forms, while Spain illustrates a third path. What they share is a growing institutional role in deciding where the threshold between continued care and accepted death will lie. That role receives less scrutiny than it should.

When Medicine Was Given the Power to Kill

I invoke Aktion T4 with care, and within narrow limits. It is not a moral equivalent to contemporary assisted-dying law. It belonged to dictatorship, coercion, secrecy, eugenics, and racial ideology. The relevance lies elsewhere: in what happens when medicine is formally authorized to treat death as an administrative outcome.

The point is not that Canada or Spain are moving toward T4. They are not. The point is narrower and more uncomfortable: T4 reveals certain institutional mechanisms in their naked form. Once death is authorized as a professional act, institutions must create language, procedure, categories, and distributed responsibility around it. Those mechanisms can appear under radically different moral and political regimes. The comparison is not of motive or regime. It is of institutional absorption.

In 1939, the German state authorized what became the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. I turn to it here because it shows, with horrifying clarity, what can happen when medicine is authorized to make death part of its work. Once killing is absorbed into administration, language and its professional role begin to change with it.

The decree itself was brief. Backdated to the start of the war, it authorized selected physicians to grant a “mercy death” to patients judged incurably ill. The language was clinical, and the administration was methodical.

Questionnaires went to psychiatric hospitals and care institutions. Three physicians who had never seen the patients reviewed condensed descriptions of diagnosis, behavior, and functional status. They marked forms, with a majority verdict granting the patient life or death. A red plus might mean transfer to a killing center and a blue minus could mean temporary reprieve.

The machinery was ordinary, even banal in one sense. Lists, transport, certificates, and letters to families citing routine causes of death—usually measles in the case of children—turned murder into sequence and administration. Responsibility was distributed across professional roles.

The justification combined pity with burden. The program claimed to relieve suffering and free resources for the war effort. Patients were reduced to bureaucratic categories and, in the most chilling formula, to lives “unworthy of life” (if not “useless eaters”).

That language did moral work. The program spoke as relief rather than cruelty. Doctors were invited to think of themselves as agents of mercy. The state presented killing as something done for the patient and for society. One lesson of the twentieth century is that once killing can be described as benevolence, moral resistance weakens inside the system.

The program widened. After public protest forced the formal suspension of the centralized, “clinical” gas chambers in 1941, decentralized killing continued by starvation, neglect, and overdose. Authorization had already done its work.

Modern assisted-dying laws are defended in the language of consent, rights, and individual suffering. The contexts, intentions, and political forms are radically different.

The echo is about what institutions learn to do once a new authority has been granted. Once the ending of life enters the medical profession’s authorized scope, language softens, death can be administratively reclassified, eligibility tends to widen, and moral weight moves from the physician to the form. These markers appear in Canada and Spain, too. Granted, consent, democratic legitimacy, and the absence of eugenic ideology are real and important differences. Even so, they do not prevent the institutional markers from emerging.

A medical profession can adapt quickly when the state gives it a new role in deciding when death may be provided. Doctors do not need to think of themselves as monsters. They may still see themselves as healers while procedure and softened language make the new authority easier to inhabit.

For that reason, the history belongs inside the argument. The differences are profound. Authorization still alters the institutions that absorb it.

How Procedure Makes Death Easier to Manage

Large institutions run on forms and procedures. They have to. Criteria, review mechanisms, and reporting help prevent arbitrariness. They can also drain moral shock from an act.

Aktion T4 showed this in the most terrible way. Questionnaires, transport lists, standard letters, and false certificates turned killing into paperwork. Responsibility was spread across offices and roles.

Contemporary systems differ radically in moral and political terms. The forms, however, have a family resemblance at the level of institutional effect. Procedure makes action easier to process. In Canada, assisted death is documented, reviewed, and reported. In Britain, end-of-life disputes move through hearings, expert evidence, written judgments, and orders. The machinery is orderly. Decisions become legible to administration.

Kafka saw something about this before bioethics existed as a field. In The Trial and The Castle, authority does not usually arrive shouting. It arrives through files, rules, offices, and reasoning that cannot quite be reached. The violence lies in distance and smoothness as much as in force.

That counts here. Once suffering is translated into criteria, prognosis into evidentiary weight, and welfare into legal standard, responsibility is redistributed. Something in the living encounter is thinned out.

Routine changes perception, until what once felt grave starts to seem administratively ordinary.

Procedure is, of course, necessary. Without it, medicine and law would become arbitrary. But procedure can also make grave decisions easier to handle than they ought to be. Once an act can be reported, audited, scheduled, and calculated, it begins to move through the system with less resistance.

The danger often begins there, in the smoothness that makes cruelty easier to miss.

The twentieth century left for us another warning. Historians of Nazi education have shown how mathematics textbooks taught schoolchildren to calculate the public cost of caring for institutionalized patients. One exercise stated that a mentally ill person cost four Reichsmark a day and then asked how many 1,000-Reichsmark marriage loans could be funded if the money spent on roughly 300,000 institutionalized patients were redirected (H. W. Koch, The Hitler Youth, 1975, p. 174).

That is what happens when care is translated into arithmetic. The mechanism is older than the technology that now amplifies it.

If assisted death becomes more deeply routinized in an age of optimization and algorithmic management, the danger will move beyond bedside judgment. What can be measured tends to enter systems of management. The older phrase “for your own good” may survive there, too, colder and harder to resist.

A system can remain polite, well-ordered, and professionally sincere while becoming less morally alert. It can begin to treat the successful processing of a case as if that were enough. In these matters, hesitation may be one of the last signs that conscience is still awake.

Dignity Beyond Autonomy

The argument for assisted dying is often anchored in autonomy. A competent adult who suffers should be free to decide how and when life ends. That claim carries force: consent matters, and so does refusal of treatment. But autonomy should not bear the whole weight of dignity.

Autonomy is morally serious, but it is not the source of human worth. If dignity depended on self-command, then the infant, the severely demented, the delirious, the depressed, and the unconscious would stand on thinner moral ground. After what the twentieth century revealed, they do not.

Many human beings either do not possess autonomy or do not retain it. Their worth does not rise or fall with their capacity to choose, explain, consent, or command themselves. Human value has to be deeper than competence, otherwise dignity becomes least secure precisely where protection is most needed.

Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, after surviving the camps, that human value does not depend on strength or usefulness. A person does not become less human through weakness or dependence. Illness does not cancel dignity. Neither does confusion.

This matters because suffering changes how life is perceived from within. Pain narrows the world. Fear and exhaustion can make dependence feel like shame. If dignity is tied too closely to self-command, the loss of independence starts to resemble the loss of value.

That is where burden-thinking enters. Its ugliest forms are easy to condemn; its quieter forms are harder to recognize. Dependence, severe illness, or prolonged care can begin to make death seem easier to justify than continued life. That is precisely why dignity cannot be reduced to autonomy, function, or cost.

Modern assisted-dying laws arise in a wholly different moral and political world from exterminationist regimes. They are built around consent and framed as a response to suffering.

The trouble begins when death appears inside medicine as a benefit under certain conditions. Someone must then decide whether suffering is severe enough, whether the condition is irreversible enough, and whether continued life still remains good for this person.

Those judgments may be careful and humane. They still alter the moral field. A person who already feels like a burden may hear something in that field long before any explicit pressure is applied. A depressed patient may interpret the existence of eligibility as confirmation. An elderly person may begin to wonder whether asking for continued care is an imposition.

Pressure does not always arrive as a command. Sometimes it is a lowered voice, a form left on the table, a daughter who has not slept, a patient who has begun to apologize for still being alive.

If dignity is intrinsic, it remains even where autonomy has faded. It remains in dependence and pain. A society can honor that and still withdraw futile treatment, relieve suffering, and acknowledge approaching death. What it should be slower to accept is the idea that death itself belongs among the remedies of care.

The Cultural Softening of Death

Law changes, and culture follows more quietly.

Where assisted dying is legal, public language tends to shift over time. Early debate is often juridical, concerned with rights, safeguards, eligibility, and constitutional lines. Later the moral tone changes. Assisted death begins to appear in public storytelling under gentler light.

A familiar scene recurs: the prepared room, the calm final hours, and the language of gratitude and peace. The death is made intelligible as a good death, or at least a beautiful one.

That development is understandable. Families may want language for what has happened. Journalists need narrative shape. Clinicians may speak sincerely about the mercy they believe the death contains. Through repetition, those stories acquire cultural force.

Then another question arises: what becomes of those who continue to live in pain, confusion, disability, or dependency, and what becomes of endurance itself?

Endurance is rarely photogenic. Chronic illness does not usually arrange itself into a moving scene. Dependency can be humiliating. Poverty makes ordinary days harder before it makes them tragic. To persist under such conditions may require courage, but it seldom looks like the composed final scenes through which assisted death is often made publicly legible.

In a culture that increasingly admires the controlled exit, survival can start to look like failure of nerve even when no one says so openly.

For that reason, I worry about beautification. A society may permit assisted dying under law. The graver habit is wrapping the act in so much admiration that continued life under severe hardship begins to look faintly embarrassing. The pressure here is atmospheric, and the vulnerable absorb it first.

A decent culture ought to preserve room for another form of dignity: staying alive through pain and dependence without being quietly judged for it.

The Obligation to Hesitate

Every society must decide what medicine is for when suffering becomes severe. It must also decide how much authority belongs to the patient, the doctor, the court, and the state when those claims collide.

These decisions are never merely technical. Over time, they teach a society what to notice, what to accept, and what to stop finding strange.

Modern assisted-dying regimes do not arise from sadism. They arise from pity and revulsion before pain, from sympathy, and from the wish to spare another human being further torment. Those motives are real. They do not deserve cheap caricature.

Across these different cases, decisions about death often appear under a benevolent sign: dignity, best interests, mercy, relief, compassion, peace. The hard question is who gets to define the good, how that definition hardens once it enters law and policy, and what becomes normal after that.

A society crosses a dangerous line when it grows comfortable describing the deliberate ending of life as a benefit.

Montaigne’s old question, Que sais-je?—“What do I know?”—still has force here. Judgment should be humbled, especially in matters of suffering and death.

Modern institutions are not built for humility. Legislatures have to legislate, courts have to decide, physicians have to act, and bureaucracies press ambiguity toward usable clarity. In cases where the result is irreversible death, however, clarity by itself does not amount to moral achievement.

Here caution matters. Hesitation has nothing to do with cowardice, sentimentality about pain, or the demand to keep the dying alive at any cost. It is a refusal to let the authority to end life become just another power that institutions exercise with increasing confidence. A people can lose something without noticing the moment of loss. In this case, what is lost is doubt: the discipline of remembering that human beings exceed the categories used to assess them, and that benevolence has often done dangerous work when joined to organized power.

The older discipline of medicine still has moral force: preserve life where possible, relieve pain, and stay present with the person who suffers. That discipline is harder than it sounds. It asks doctors and institutions to remain near suffering without converting death into a solution too easily offered, too cleanly processed, or too fluently defended.

Where the result is irreversible death, certainty should remain difficult. If a society stops hesitating in such cases, that should trouble us. It may mean less that compassion has deepened than that the machinery has become smoother.

Holocaust education remains one of the most important historical and moral responsibilities within schools, museums, and civic institutions. Historical accuracy, survivor testimony, archival preservation, and genocide education continue to play an essential role in helping students understand one of history’s greatest human catastrophes.

Yet educators today face an increasingly urgent challenge: how to help students move beyond memorizing historical facts toward understanding the human consequences of prejudice, dehumanization, and social division in the present day.

The Facility, LEDI Center, and Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated program was developed in response to that challenge. LEDI offers a permanent facility, traveling facility, and portable facility to meet the growing need.

Spearheaded by the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, and now its own 501(c)(3), LEDI combines Holocaust education, art, storytelling, restorative educational practices, and reflective discussion to help students examine oppression through the lens of individual human lives. Rather than teaching the Holocaust exclusively through political timelines or historical abstraction, the program asks students to consider who these victims were as people: what they hoped for, what futures they imagined, and what responsibilities exist today in preventing hatred and dehumanization from repeating in new forms.

At the center of LEDI is a four-hour immersive field trip experience that brings middle and high school students into direct engagement with the exhibition through guided discussions, audio narratives, reflective writing, music, and art-making activities. The field trip program has already reached more than 6,000 students across New Jersey and Florida, while the Foundation’s broader curriculum integration efforts now reach more than 15,000 students annually in classrooms.

The educational model is grounded in a central belief: students are more likely to recognize the dangers of prejudice when they can connect intellectually and emotionally to the humanity of others.

Unlike traditional educational approaches that often position students as passive observers of history, LEDI encourages active engagement. Students analyze portraits, listen to stories connected to individual victims, examine symbolism within artwork, and participate in discussions focused on identity, prejudice, empathy, resilience, and moral responsibility.

The experience begins by reframing how students encounter Holocaust history.

Rather than introducing victims primarily through statistics or historical summaries, LEDI focuses on individuality. Students are asked to think about the lives that existed before persecution: friendships, interests, talents, dreams, insecurities, families, and futures that were interrupted.

One activity asks students to reflect on the life of Holocaust victim Miriam Klein and answer a simple question: “What would you have hoped for Miriam and her life?”

The responses reveal the way students begin reconnecting history to humanity:

• “Miriam could go to college and achieve her dreams.”

• “I want her to become an artist.”

• “She could have a Big Mac and do anything she wanted.”

• “I want her to fall in love.”

• “Miriam can go to a sleepover and share a secret.”

What makes these reflections meaningful is their simplicity. Students do not respond with historical analysis or abstract language. Instead, they focus on ordinary human experiences—education, friendship, creativity, belonging, growing up. The victims of the Holocaust stop existing only as historical symbols and begin existing as individuals whose lives should have continued.

That shift changes the way many students begin thinking about prejudice and oppression more broadly.

Throughout the field trip, students are introduced to the idea that hatred rarely begins with violence. The Holocaust did not begin with concentration camps. It began much earlier—through language, exclusion, stereotypes, indifference, and the gradual normalization of prejudice.

One framework explored during the program traces that progression:

• Judgment becomes prejudgment.
• Prejudgment becomes prejudice.
• Prejudice becomes hate.
• Hate, when normalized, becomes oppression.

Students often connect to this idea quickly because they already recognize forms of exclusion within their own lives and communities. Bullying, assumptions about identity, online cruelty, social isolation, and stereotyping are experiences many students have either witnessed or encountered personally. LEDI helps students understand how these behaviors connect to larger historical patterns of dehumanization.

Importantly, the program does not approach students as passive recipients of information. Students are encouraged to reflect, question, discuss, and respond creatively to what they encounter.

Art plays a central role in this process.

The portraits inside LEDI are not designed simply to illustrate tragedy. They are intended to restore individuality and identity to lives that were systematically erased. Students spend time studying facial expressions, symbolism, color, posture, and atmosphere within the paintings while listening to accompanying narratives and music. Through that process, many students begin asking different kinds of questions—not only about what happened historically, but about how societies learn to stop seeing certain people as fully human.

The reflective writing completed during the field trip reveals the depth of those conversations.

When asked how oppression impacts people’s lives, one student wrote:

“Oppression shatters and destroys people’s lives, dreams, and emotions… it dehumanizes people, and having dreams and emotions is part of being human.”

Another student reflected: “Oppression can impact people’s lives, dreams, and emotions because if you keep building on oppression it can turn into genocide or making laws to dehumanize a select religion or race.”

Students are also asked to think about empathy not as agreement, but as perspective-taking and human recognition.

One student explained: “If you cannot relate to what they have been through, you can try to view the world in their perspective.”

Another wrote: “Don’t judge people based on their look; understand their experiences. Even if your experiences are different from each other, you’ll still find something in common.”

These reflections are important because they demonstrate how students begin connecting historical education to present-day behavior and relationships. The conversations move beyond the Holocaust alone and into broader discussions about identity, dignity, prejudice, and community responsibility.

One of the most significant shifts educators observe during the field trip experience is students’ growing willingness to participate in difficult conversations. Students who initially approach the visit as a history assignment often begin engaging more personally with the material. They ask more thoughtful questions, participate more openly in discussions, and make clearer connections between historical injustice and issues affecting their own communities.

Teachers have reported students continuing these conversations after returning to school. Some students begin speaking more openly about bullying and exclusion within their classrooms. Others become more willing to share personal experiences or discuss difficult social topics through writing and art.

The final portion of the field trip focuses on action and responsibility.

Students are asked to identify issues within their own schools or communities—bullying, loneliness, racism, anti-Semitism, exclusion, or online harassment—and then reflect on one realistic action they could personally take to improve their environment.

The responses are often intentionally practical:

• “Speak up when someone is bullied.”

• “Listen before judging.”

• “Defend people when others don’t.”

• “Invite someone to sit with me.”

The significance of these responses lies in their scale. LEDI does not ask students to solve global injustice in a single moment. Instead, the program emphasizes that communities are shaped through everyday interpersonal choices: whether individuals choose to include others, challenge prejudice, or remain silent when harm occurs.

This philosophy is closely tied to one of the program’s central concepts: becoming an “upstander” rather than a bystander.

Students are encouraged to think about civic responsibility not as something abstract or distant, but as something practiced daily through relationships, classrooms, conversations, and community behavior. The field trip consistently reinforces the idea that prejudice grows when indifference becomes normalized, and that small acts of courage can interrupt that process before it escalates.

The role of storytelling and creative expression within the program also appears to have a meaningful impact on students. Many students describe art as a way to build empathy, create dialogue, and help communities better understand one another’s experiences.

One student wrote: “We can use art to show what we want to achieve to other people. This allows us to connect with others and build empathy.”

Another reflected: “It helps us share our stories so we can connect to each other and build empathy. Stories will help us think about each other’s lives and understand the challenges we’ve been through.”

These reflections point toward one of LEDI’s broader educational goals: helping students understand that storytelling itself can be a tool for human connection and social responsibility.

This approach is particularly relevant at a time when many educators are grappling with how to teach difficult history in ways that remain meaningful for younger generations. As the number of living Holocaust survivors declines, programs like LEDI represent an evolving effort to preserve memory while also helping students connect that history to contemporary moral questions.

The field trip model attempts to address this challenge by combining historical learning with opportunities for reflection, dialogue, creativity, and personal responsibility. Rather than asking students only to remember the past, LEDI encourages them to think about how they participate in shaping the present.

Ultimately, the program aims to leave students with more than historical information alone.

It aims to help them recognize how prejudice develops, how dehumanization becomes normalized, and how empathy, attention, and moral courage can strengthen communities before hatred escalates into something far more dangerous.

That may be one of the most important lessons Holocaust education can offer future generations—not only about history, but about humanity itself.

For more information, please visit ledicenter.com.

For Dr. David M. Milch, remembrance is not passive. It is an act of responsibility.

As the son of two Holocaust survivors, Dr. Milch has spent much of his life grappling with the profound legacy of inherited trauma, memory, resilience, and moral obligation. That identity has deeply shaped both his worldview and his desire to ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten, while also creating pathways for humanity to recognize suffering across cultures, communities, and generations.

Through the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, Dr. Milch has dedicated himself to two interconnected missions: youth mentoring and arts for social impact. Guided by the Jewish principle of tikkun olam—repairing the world—his work seeks to foster empathy, civic responsibility, and human connection in an increasingly polarized age.

A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Milch built a distinguished career as an entrepreneur in the life sciences and technology sectors. Yet, alongside his work in medicine and innovation, he has remained deeply committed to philanthropy rooted in humanism and historical memory.

That commitment is perhaps most powerfully embodied in Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated (LEDI), the Foundation’s groundbreaking exhibition and education initiative dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, dialogue, and healing through art. The exhibition reimagines the lives of young women and girls murdered during the Holocaust through paintings, music, storytelling, and educational programming. But, for Dr. Milch, LEDI is about more than history alone.

“The Holocaust happened,” he says plainly—a foundational truth and moral stake in the ground for him as a child of survivors. Yet he also believes that no one community has a monopoly on suffering, and that one of the great challenges of humanity is learning how to acknowledge pain without turning it into competition.

As a “2G,” Dr. Milch understands that memory can either harden people into isolation or open them toward deeper compassion. His choice has been the latter. Through LEDI and the Foundation’s broader work, he seeks to create spaces where difficult histories can be confronted honestly while also building bridges between communities that have experienced trauma, discrimination, hatred, or violence.

Central to that mission is his belief in the transformative power of art.

Dr. Milch sees art and the artist as essential tools for emotional connection. Facts alone, he argues, are often insufficient to help people truly understand painful histories. Art allows people to feel before they judge. It opens a human doorway into stories that might otherwise feel distant, overwhelming, or abstract.

In interviews about LEDI, Dr. Milch has described how paintings based on photographs of Holocaust victims can create an emotional resonance that traditional education alone sometimes cannot. Music, visual imagery, storytelling, and performance become vehicles for empathy—helping audiences, especially young people, connect emotionally to histories of anti-Semitism, genocide, racism, and intolerance.

Importantly, he believes this artistic framework extends beyond Jewish history. Dr. Milch has consistently emphasized that all human stories deserve recognition and dignity. The Foundation’s work intentionally creates dialogue across communities, acknowledging both the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the broader reality of human suffering throughout history.

This philosophy has shaped the expansion of LEDI into schools and communities across the United States. In Jacksonville, Florida, the Foundation helped develop Holocaust and genocide educational programming for Duval County Public Schools, reaching thousands of students annually. The initiative combines historical education with artistic engagement and conversations about becoming “upstanders” rather than bystanders in the face of hatred and injustice.

At the heart of Dr. Milch’s work is a refusal to surrender to cynicism or extremism. He believes deeply in dialogue, humility, and the possibility of common ground. In a world increasingly driven by outrage and division, he hopes to create experiences that draw people back toward empathy, reflection, and shared humanity.

For Dr. Milch, illumination is both metaphor and mission.

It is the light of memory carried forward by a son of survivors. It is the light art can shine into difficult truths. And it is the light he hopes future generations will carry into a more compassionate and connected world.

Riefenstahl, Ishioka, Arbus: a Sadean discipline of looking

This essay is a walk through my own cabinet of curiosities, guided by a set of questions I would rather not ask: why a certain beauty moves me, what kind of hold it has on my body and my thinking, and how far that hold colludes with a smooth, amoral power that lets form shine while the screams stay offstage. I move between Leni Riefenstahl’s stadiums and reefs, Eiko Ishioka’s advertising and Olympic ceremonies, Diane Arbus’s deformed faces, the baroque crime tableaux of the television series Hannibal, and the intellectual circle around Susan Sontag. They share little on the surface except the ability to seize the eye and hold it longer than is safe. I keep the Marquis de Sade in the background as a discipline rather than a hero, a knife laid on the table to cut through the alibis that usually protect such pleasures. Riefenstahl stands here for beauty enlisted by power, Ishioka for beauty used as force, and Arbus for something more fragile that I can only name later. What follows is an attempt to let each of these figures speak, then to turn the same impolite question on them and on myself: who is enjoying what, and what has to be pushed out of sight to keep that enjoyment intact?

Opening the Pandora’s box

There is a kind of image that cuts me more deeply than I would like to admit.

A body held in clean light: an Olympic diver suspended in air, a Nubian wrestler, a swimmer inside a vertical shaft of blue. The framing is so strict that my eye obeys before thought has time to form. The arc of the back, the pale figure against a dark crowd, the rhythm of shoulders and flags: everything falls into line with a muscular calm.

My first response is pleasure. I am not ashamed of that, and I will not lie about it.

Only afterwards do I remember who made the image, and what it was serving.

Leni Riefenstahl is, for me, the clearest case of what I call the beauty of power: an eye that makes domination look luminous and inevitable, followed by decades of insisting that she loved only “form,” “harmony,” and “nature.” Eiko Ishioka, much later, lives out the power of beauty: a woman who falls for the same visual voltage, turns it toward Dracula, Tarsem Singh, Olympic spectacle and advertising, and then watches her own name dissolve into the credits. Diane Arbus stands on another axis: beauty with no request for permission, the beauty of those who never agreed to be acceptable in the first place. What moves me in her work is a different kind of connection, a brief, exposed sharing of meaning between photographer and subject, what I call the beauty of resonance.

Behind these figures I keep a fourth presence: Sade, less as a hero than as an instrument, a scalpel I have used more than once on myself. He strips away every noble story that says “this pleasure is for a higher good.” In his world there is no God, no History, no Revolution waiting to redeem what is done to a body. Pleasure and power meet directly. That lack of alibi is what I need from him.

When I speak of a “Sadean stance” here, I am not borrowing his cruelty or his politics. I am taking one discipline: refuse alibis for seduction. In Sade’s world, power is never washed clean by God, Nation, History, Revolution, or “the oppressed.” When someone hurts someone else, they do it because they want to, and he does not veil that fact with theology or dialectics. That refusal of consolation matters. For the purposes of this essay, a Sadean stance means that whenever ideology or moral rhetoric appears with beauty, I ask a narrow, impolite question: who is enjoying what, why, and what does that enjoyment need to ignore?

With that Sadean scalpel on the table, one I am prepared to turn on myself, I move through Riefenstahl, Ishioka, Arbus, Sontag’s circle, and my own responses.

Riefenstahl: the beauty of power and the seduction of the eye

Calling Riefenstahl (1902–2003) a mere technician would be comfortable. The Sadean discipline I have set myself does not allow that.

From Triumph des Willens (1934) and Olympia (1938) to The Last of the Nuba (1973) and the underwater photographs, the same temperament keeps surfacing: hard axes, clean diagonals, sculptural bodies, controlled space. Crowds are drilled into legible shapes. Torch processions and rallies are designed so that, from the camera’s height, individual bodies disappear and the mass resolves into pattern. In Olympia, the athlete is isolated as an object of worship: the diver in mid-air, the runner trimmed against sky, the discus thrower held just before release. In the Nuba sequences, dark muscle replaces Aryan flesh. Their outlandishly elongated, exquisite bodies carry a strange echo of the gorgeous creature of Giger’s Alien. In the late underwater films and photographs, human figures mostly recede. Shoals of fish, fans of coral, and drifting plants become the new cast—an ocean vivarium transformed into saturated Wagnerian bursts of pattern and light.

This is more than competent camera work. It amounts to a doctrine of form. Beauty appears where bodies or seascapes fall into proportion and noise is driven out of the frame. My own response is physical. My eye craves this symphony. That appetite is part of the danger and the temptation.

I also know that the framing acts as an aphrodisiac of power. The gratification lies in seeing disorder replaced by one rhythm: torches lifted together, columns in step, a leader fixed where all gazes converge, the Nubians glistening with sweat, the fish in an intoxicating orgy of existence. Power becomes lovable because it has been composed so elegantly. Seen with Sade’s question in mind, the scene is not complicated: someone is taking pleasure in the sight of bodies and creatures turned into obedient, breath-taking ornaments.

The television series Hannibal (2013–2015) adds another configuration of beauty and violence in this same field. Its crime scenes are arranged as tableaux: bodies turned into trees or totems, organs laid out with the care of a still-life painter, color graded like a scent advertisement. The murders revolt. And still, the images are sensuous, clever, deliberately delectable. That tension is not an accident. The show invites the viewer to admire the composition while knowing exactly what is being shown. My own response splits: part of me recoils, another part is charmed by the staging and the calm intelligence of the camera. The easy defense is “this is only fiction.” On the level of actual bodies, that is true. On the level of training the eye, it is less innocent. Beauty here does not serve the state, as in Riefenstahl, but it does serve a habit of mind: learning to separate aesthetic pleasure from ethical horror, and to keep both running at once.

John Fowles gives a harsher version of this unease in The Magus (1965). There is a cultivated Nazi officer who plays classical piano with real feeling and skill while torture goes on nearby. At a certain point, the protagonist hears music and screams together. The officer feels no contradiction. Bach and the cry belong to one aesthetic field. This is close to the space in which Riefenstahl moves. The scream is usually offscreen, but always nearby. My own reflex is to split them, to enjoy the music and file the other sound as “context.” In Sade’s terms, that reflex is simply pleasure defending itself.

Later, Riefenstahl speaks of herself as a kind of innocent. At times, she reminds me of a child who discovers that pulling the legs off a fly leaves an interesting figure on the table. The act is cruel; the fascination is fixed on the symmetry. Her post-war statements repeat the same line: she loved beauty and athletics; she was “apolitical”; she only filmed what was already there. From a Sadean angle, this is a coarse excuse. She knew enough about the project she was glorifying. She chose the pattern over the body.

Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1975) tears at this self-image. She tracks Riefenstahl’s lies about her proximity to Hitler, her claim that the Nuremberg rally of 1934 was not staged for the camera, her later repackaging as a neutral explorer of nature and the body, and the way fascist imagery reappears in Nuba and in S/M style. Sontag is sharp about the laundering of the aesthetic. What she does not linger on is the depth of the seduction. She lays out the machinery of allure but writes as if she herself were untouched by it.

There I part company with her. I know the pull. I feel it more clearly because of someone who seems, at first, far from Riefenstahl: Diane Arbus. Riefenstahl’s images present bodies eager to be accepted by power, to be chosen as its ideal ornament. Arbus will come back later as the opposite pole. For now it is enough to say that I feel the tug of both: Riefenstahl’s severe ordering of the ideal, and Arbus’s faces that refuse the ideal and stare back.

Riefenstahl through Sontag; and Zox-Weaver, Onfray, Fallaci against Sontag

Since Riefenstahl is such a catalytic case of the beauty of power, I want to take time with one of her most notable critics, Susan Sontag (1933–2004). I will sketch how Sontag handled Riefenstahl, mainly relying upon Annalisa Zox-Weaver’s reading of Sontag herself, especially her reconstruction of Sontag’s drafts and notes in the UCLA archives, and finally bring in Michel Onfray and Oriana Fallaci—not as commentators who wrote on Sontag, but as two lines of argument I apply to Sontag’s stance.

Ishioka knew Sontag. She worked under an intellectual sky shaped in Paris and refracted through New York, a sky Sontag helped import and legitimize: Sartre, Beauvoir, Genet; later Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes. Sontag admired these Parisian caviar revolutionaries, their talents and militancy, their fusion of art and politics, and she enjoyed being the one who translated them for an Anglophone public.

Sontag did not begin as Riefenstahl’s prosecutor. As Zox-Weaver shows, Sontag in the mid-1960s first stages herself as a defender of the aesthetic realm. In an essay on style, Sontag argues that content is basically bait: a lure that brings the reader’s or viewer’s attention to the formal transformations in the work of art. That, she argues, is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works that would be morally repellent if judged only by subject matter. In that context she names Triumph of the Will and Olympia as “masterpieces.” The Nazi propaganda, she admits, “is there,” yet something else is there, too. In other words, the ideal spectator in this scheme is the one who sees “Hitler” rather than Hitler, the “1936 Olympics” rather than the 1936 Olympics, and rises above indignation or approval into pure contemplation.

It is hard to imagine a posture farther from Sade’s refusal of alibi. Here is a woman who saw the same films that trouble me, felt the pull, and turned her own susceptibility into a badge of higher intelligence. It is also a safe posture. This detachment costs Sontag nothing in her own circle. It demands no reckoning with her attraction to the images, and no friction with the intellectual world that surrounds her.

As Zox-Weaver shows, in Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” she performs a reversal. Triumph of the Will becomes “the most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made.” Riefenstahl’s Nuba book is treated as an extension of the same aesthetic into coffee-table exotica, and a slim volume on SS uniforms becomes a case study in the sexualization of Nazism. The argument is often persuasive. Sontag tears apart Riefenstahl’s lies about her proximity to Hitler, her claim that the rallies were not staged for the camera, and her rebranding as a neutral artist of “primal” bodies.

Now imagine three readers in the room with that essay: one real, Annalisa Zox-Weaver, and two imagined, Michel Onfray and Oriana Fallaci. From where I sit, all three, in different ways, are or would be irritated by Sontag’s shortcomings.

Of these three, Zox-Weaver is the only actual reader of Sontag’s drafts in the UCLA archive, and everything I know about those drafts comes via her 2025 essay “The Feminist, the Filmmaker, and the Führer.” She traces versions of “Fascinating Fascism” where an anxious preface briefly appears and then disappears. In those pages, Sontag admits that shifts in popular taste make judgments seem “dishonest, almost in bad taste,” worries about dark longings coming out into the open, and warns that silence about such changes leaves “us even more vulnerable than we already are.” (The wording I quote here follows Zox-Weaver’s transcription of Sontag’s fourth draft.) Then Sontag cuts that prologue. It revealed too much: concern about fascism, but also anxiety about her own attraction to Riefenstahl’s imagery and about the desires circulating in her milieu. The published essay opens instead like a court case: “First exhibit. Here is a woman…”

Zox-Weaver is brilliant at reconstructing this shift and the pride behind it. She calls out the self-importance, the envy, the self-shielding. She shows how Sontag moves from the risky admission “I am also susceptible to this” to the safer position “I am the one who diagnoses everyone else’s susceptibility.” What Zox-Weaver underplays, to my ear, is the timidity. Sontag chooses the safest object for her moral severity. She turns her full seriousness on an aging German filmmaker and on Nazi kitsch, while keeping a tactful silence about the Parisian theorists and radicals on whom she depended, whose own flirtations with violence, Maoism, pedophilia (in Foucault’s case), and elegant anti-Semitism (though not in Sartre and Beauvoir’s) would have been more dangerous to confront. She knows where the live wires are and keeps her hands off. That, I would add to Zox-Weaver’s file, is a form of cowardice.

Onfray, if we bring him into the same room, drags the background forward. His great labor is to refuse the idea that the Paris canon is sacred weather. He lines up Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and the rest like a gallery of compromised saints and knocks them from their plinths. He presents himself as speaking against the “court philosophers” who provided glamor for regimes and movements that crushed bodies, whether under Soviet Stalinism, in Maoist China, or in the various anti-Semitic currents they were willing to excuse. On that point, Sontag remains almost entirely silent.

If Onfray had read Sontag on Riefenstahl, he would not stay with Riefenstahl for long. He would ask why the same cold light is not turned on the friends, mentors, and idols whose names float through Sontag’s essays. He would see in her silence about that circle the classic reflex of an insider: the courage to condemn a distant emblem of evil, and the reluctance to expose the complicities of one’s own house. In his fashion he performs one operation Sontag never quite risks. He treats the sky under which she moves as an object of moral scrutiny.

Fallaci (1929–2006), the third reader, comes from another angle again. She does not grow up between lofts and seminars. She liked to recall that she had been “a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.” She spent her life interviewing presidents, dictators, revolutionaries, often at real personal risk. She was furious and stubborn, and, in her later years, wrote about Islam, anti-Semitism, and the West in a language shaped by the wound she carried from those early battles. She was also one of the first to warn that parts of the left-wing intelligentsia would flirt with, or even embrace, Islamist movements.

If Fallaci reads Sontag’s early defense of Triumph of the Will and later prosecution of it, I imagine her impatience would be simple. She would have interviewed Riefenstahl as well as Sontag and then asked both of them: “Where were you when it mattered? And where are you when it matters now?” For Fallaci, the idea that truth always sits in the middle is not sophistication but betrayal. Sometimes, she insists, truth gathers on one side; pretending otherwise serves those who hold power and guns. She grants no prestige to suspended judgment. In this sense, she is far from what is now called “politically correct.” The whole notion of the “ideal spectator” floats, for her, in an airless room. Images are not just for contemplation; they are tools regimes use to prepare real violence. Detachment at a safe distance from risk is not a higher form of ethics. It is what you can afford when you are not in the line of fire.

Set against that, Sontag’s fascination with which viewers may safely enjoy fascist imagery feels like a salon problem. Where Sontag presides over a séance of taste, deciding with which images the elite can play without moral contamination, Fallaci prefers the interrogation room. Her long interviews with Kissinger, Khomeini, Arafat, the Shah have one aim: strip away justifications, expose vanity, force the man in front of her to hear his own words. She is not beyond indignation and approval; she is fueled by indignation, and by a partisan memory of what fascism did to ordinary lives. She is willing to risk her own body for the questions she asks. Sontag, in contrast, risks reputation within a circle, but not the circle itself.

From my angle, all three—Zox-Weaver, Onfray, and Fallaci—reveal a different face of Sontag’s double talk around Reifenstahl. Zox-Weaver exposes the pivot from seduced viewer to moral judge and the pride that accompanies it. Onfray exposes the refusal to apply that same severity to Sontag’s own intellectual sky. Fallaci exposes the distance between salon courage and the kind that costs something. Together they make my own verdict harsher than Zox-Weaver’s cool irritation about vanity and envy. Facing Riefenstahl, Sontag is not just pompous: she is careful to aim her boldness where it will not endanger her affiliations.

And I am not exempt from their scrutiny. I am close to Sontag in education and habits, close to Onfray in my impatience with fashionable nihilism, close to Fallaci in my distrust of “political correctness” as a moral pose. I recognize myself in Sontag’s sentences, in Onfray’s bluntness, in Fallaci’s refusal to bend. I also enjoy standing at a slight angle to each of them, harvesting what I want without paying their full price. That, too, is a strategy of safety. The Sadean discipline demands that I name it as such: another form of enjoyment, another alibi I would prefer not to see.

Ishioka: the power of beauty and the cost of bracketing

Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012) enters as another worker of images, another woman intent on controlling the frame. For readers who do not know her name, you almost certainly know some of her work. The red armor and blue velvet gowns in Coppola’s Dracula (1992); the impossible white and crimson costumes that turn Jennifer Lopez into a moving icon in The Cell (2000); the gold-and-blood visuals of Immortals (2011); the candy-poisoned fairy-tale surfaces of Mirror, Mirror (2012); the massed drummers and scroll-like banners at the Běijīng Olympics (2008). All of that comes from the same eye.

She begins in Tōkyō advertising in the 1960s, jolting conservative visuals with muscular women, uncanny poses, disruptive compositions. From there she moves into theatre and film: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Dracula, The Cell, The Fall (2006), Immortals, Mirror, Mirror. She designs uniforms and outerwear for several national teams at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics, and later serves as director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the Běijīng 2008 Olympics, drilling thousands of bodies into a single, terrifyingly unified image. She creates album covers and posters that sink into a city’s visual memory. Her signature is a kind of aggressive clarity: bodies turned into living calligraphy, color pushed until it almost vibrates, silhouettes that claim the whole screen. In her memoir, she describes Riefenstahl as a woman driven by three passions—reverence for nature, creative fervor, and Eros—and she calls the twentieth century a time when women artists at last outran men. She clearly wants Riefenstahl inside that lineage. For Ishioka herself, the satisfaction lies in making images that dominate the field and feel unmistakably hers. Her life is a long experiment in the power of beauty.

Ishioka does not encounter Riefenstahl as a distant case study. She handles her work directly. First, she conceives a major Tōkyō exhibition of The Last of the Nuba and edits the Japanese Nuba volume, presenting Riefenstahl’s images of scarified, elongated bodies to a Japanese public as a kind of ultimate athletic beauty. Later, she curates a second show at Bunkamura devoted to Riefenstahl’s life and images, and brings Riefenstahl herself to walk through it. She moves inside those photographs with the confidence of someone who could have taken them. When she writes about Riefenstahl’s films, she reaches for a sports metaphor: other directors show off with little breaking balls, she says, but Riefenstahl throws a fastball straight into the viewer’s chest. That is the quality she admires, the unembarrassed directness of the appeal, the refusal of half-measures. In books and interviews, she speaks of Riefenstahl less as Hitler’s decorator than as a model of ruthless artistic will and of what a woman can force out of a hostile industry.

Here the political irony bites. Ishioka is moved by Riefenstahl’s Nuba images, by the beauty of those elongated bodies and scarified skins, and helps reintroduce them to Japan. Not long after, she lends her talent to the Běijīng Olympics, producing another kind of disciplined spectacle for a regime that, in the same years, is shielding the Sudanese government whose genocidal violence falls on peoples like the Nuba. The circle is not exact, but the echo is hard to ignore: one woman elevates a threatened African culture into icons of physical grace; later she helps choreograph the public face of a power that protects its persecutors. The beauty on the stadium floor does not mention any of this. It does not have to. Its task is to dazzle.

The appeal remains clear. Ishioka sees in Riefenstahl proof that a woman can seize the camera and dictate how bodies and space will look. In the macho environment she knew, that is almost intoxicating. Her implicit bargain is simple: “I will take the will, the discipline, the formal grammar, and hold the politics at arm’s length.” The self-flattery lies in believing that such a clean extraction is possible. Even when critics like Sontag revive the argument that any celebration of Riefenstahl is a form of collaboration, Ishioka recounts it as if it were a misunderstanding: audiences want clever, ironic “breaking balls,” while Riefenstahl simply throws what she believes in. The problem, in her telling, is the viewer’s taste, not the object of admiration.

I am very close to Ishioka here. The same charge runs through me when I look at Riefenstahl’s and Ishioka’s work. What grips me is not any love for the regime but the sense of someone bending the medium to her will. It would be easy to tell myself that I care only about this grammar and can carry it away, purified. The hesitation comes from knowing how often “pure beauty” has been invoked to hide what lies underneath. After the twentieth century, and after the recent carnival of anti-Semitic spectacle dressed up as justice, I no longer trust that phrase.

There is another, quieter brutality in Ishioka’s story. Riefenstahl never stops marking her work as hers. Ishioka’s authorship often dissolves. Directors, studios, and campaigns lift her inventions and present them as inevitable, as if they appeared by themselves. My earlier pleasure, as a viewer, was in spotting “Eiko traces” everywhere. Under Sade’s question—who gains when her name disappears—the picture shifts. Beauty still does its work, selling films and brands and prestige, while the woman whose eye created it is treated as a replaceable technician.

Among her many achievements, one work points in a different direction and will eventually bring us closer to Arbus. The Fall sits in a different light from her more openly spectacular projects. Co-created with her future husband Nicholas “Nico” Soultanakis and Tarsem Singh, in a position that gave her a reach beyond costume into the whole fabric of the film, it tells a small story about a suicidal stuntman in a 1920s hospital and a little girl who refuses to leave his side. He keeps her there with an extravagant fantasy tale; she answers by believing him enough to tie him back to life. When it was remastered in 4K and shown in Tōkyō in November of 2025, after nearly 20 years of relative obscurity, younger viewers received it not as a glorification of power but as a baroque relay for meaning, wrapped in beauty, in a world that offers very little of either. If Triumph of the Will stages beauty as an accomplice to harm, The Fall shows the same appetite for image harnessed to keep nihilism at bay a little longer. I will come back to that shift when I turn to Arbus and to a third kind of beauty.

Arbus: beauty of resonance

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) stands at the far edge of this field. If Riefenstahl shows the beauty of bodies drilled to serve power, and Ishioka spends her life testing the power of beauty, Arbus belongs to another line again. I think of it as a beauty of resonance. It is the small, stubborn echo that passes between two exposed beings who recognize themselves in each other’s unease and stay in the room.

Her photographs draw me with a different kind of force. They are breathtaking, yet they do not console. They are also not cold. The people in them are “freaks” in the old vocabulary, visibly different—wrong for the stadium, wrong for the ideal. The feeling I have in front of them is not curiosity about deformity and not admiration of defiance. It is closer to com-passion in the original sense: feeling with. A shared fever, a shared wound, a shared effort to stay standing in a world that has already judged.

The beauty in these images does not lie in smoothing anything over. Faces remain awkward, bodies remain strange, the rooms are often shabby. Nothing is softened. What matters is the way Arbus stands with them. She enters their space and lets the same hard light fall on all of them, herself included. There is no balcony, no safe distance. The gaze is level. Her subjects look into the camera, and, by extension, at us, without apology and without any gesture of “take me in.” The picture holds the moment where two discomforts meet and neither retreats. That is the shape of resonance I mean.

Before I stay longer in these rooms, I want to mark a small constellation of lives and fictions that sit closer to Arbus’s side of the field than to Riefenstahl’s: Stefan Zweig, C. S. Lewis, Salinger’s Esmé, and, on another register, The Fall.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), a Viennese Jew steeped in European high culture, watches the rise of the regime Riefenstahl served. His chosen beauties are books, music, private decency. As that world collapses, he goes into exile and finally kills himself in Brazil. His last letters carry a flat, drained grief. He does not turn disaster into a “tragic sublime” or frame his suicide as a meaningful gesture. He lets beauty fail. In a field where Riefenstahl fuses beauty to political power and turns it into a narcotic, Zweig stands for a very different relation: beauty that is powerless against the state, and a writer who refuses to convert that powerlessness into a consoling myth.

In 1939, C. S. Lewis tells nervous students at Oxford that “favourable conditions never come.” People have always tried to think and create while the world burned somewhere: war, plague, invasion. If one waited for safety, there would be no thinking at all. There is a kind of quiet beauty in that stance, the image of a small circle of minds continuing their work while bombers cross the sky. At the same time, Lewis is careful not to treat this as heroism. He does not aestheticize war or baptize it as a purifying ordeal. He is describing a discipline rather than staging a spectacle. Where Riefenstahl offers beauty as an amplifier of power, Lewis presents a modest intellectual constancy that neither glorifies power nor pretends to stand outside it. His position is simple: carry on, without turning endurance into theater.

J. D. Salinger’s For Esmé—with Love and Squalor (1950) works at a much smaller scale. A damaged soldier, a cheap room, the letter of a child who barely knows him, and a slight loosening of the knot in his mind. The beauty here sits in a minimal gesture of care, almost nothing in outward form. The pleasure is modest, the relief of not being entirely alone. There is no claim to redemption, no stadium, no myth, only a tiny increase of meaning in one life. The Fall, which Ishioka helped shape far beyond the wardrobe, does something similar on a different scale: a man who wants to die keeps living just long enough to finish a story for a girl who believes him. Beauty here is neither stadium nor freak-show. It is a relay for meaning against the pull of nothingness.

All four mark a different weather from Riefenstahl’s stadium. Here beauty neither intoxicates crowds nor redeems history. It gives one mind just enough resonance with another to keep going a little longer, or, in Zweig’s case, to show that even when that resonance fails it need not be dressed up as glory. This is the climate in which I place Arbus.

Sontag, in On Photography (1977), chose to see Arbus as a connoisseur of freakishness, a voyeur feeding on the damaged. It is worth remembering that Arbus was another woman she did not like. There is a narrow truth in her accusation: someone is always looking, and the one who holds the camera has more freedom than the one who holds still. Yet the verdict misses the temperature of the work. The passion in these photographs is not the sadism of the spectator. It is the fire and hurt that pass between sitter and photographer and settle into the frame. Pain is there, but it is not isolated as a specimen. It is recognized. Arbus does not decorate it, does not redeem it, does not hide it. She stays in the room with it.

If I bring Sade’s question here and ask who is enjoying what, and what has to be ignored to keep that enjoyment intact, the answer shifts. My pleasure in Arbus is not the pleasure of looking at the other from safety. It is the jolt of recognizing that the line between “freak” and “normal” is thin, and that the unease in their eyes is also mine. There is still a risk of self-flattery, the comfort of believing myself to be on their side, against the stadium. I do not want to pretend that risk is not there. Even so, I cannot read these pictures as mere exploitation. The photographer has put herself into the same harsh light. The images feel less like trophies than records of a fragile communion.

In the larger pattern of this essay, Arbus anchors another corner. Riefenstahl’s beauty is the beauty of submission to an ideal that belongs to someone else. Ishioka’s beauty is the beauty a woman tries to wrest back into her own hands, only to see it often stripped of her name. Arbus’s beauty is the beauty of resonance: two human beings standing in a bare room with no alibi, no myth of health or nation to hide behind, and enduring the look together. Whatever power there is in these images comes from that com-passion, not from the humiliation of the person seen. In that sense she belongs to the same small family as Salinger’s Esmé and The Fall, where a man and a child keep each other alive a little longer through words and images. Beauty appears there, as in Arbus’s rooms, as a relay passed between exposed beings so that neither has to face the void entirely alone.

Where I stand, without alibi

What remains is the question of why any of this matters: what, if anything, such fragile resonances and refusals have to do with beauty, and, beneath that, what kinds of meaning with which a person can still bear to live.

My pleasures are not pure. I enjoy Riefenstahl’s images at the level of eye and nerves. I relish Ishioka’s transformations, the way she drags that grammar into new myths and surfaces. Arbus’s faces draw me with the sense of standing in the room with them. The perverse elegance of Hannibal’s crime scenes attracts me, along with my own discomfort in that attraction. I also take pleasure in seeing through the excuses of Sontag’s milieu and the French theorists, and through the current radical chic that turns anti-Semitic excitement into moral theater. I enjoy the feeling of holding all this in view without collapsing.

I protect these pleasures with useful stories: that I am only analyzing, that my distance from every tribe keeps me honest, that knowing how seduction works makes me less seducible. I calculate that tracing the mechanisms gives me a margin of freedom, while admitting that it does not cancel the appetite.

Since Riefenstahl built her fame on glorifying the man who ordered the camps, it seems right that at least one voice here should come from someone who saw them from inside. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) stands at an angle to all this. What Salinger sketches in miniature—a cracked mind held together a little longer by a child’s letter—Frankl tries to name as a law. In the camps he concludes that a person’s main concern is not simply to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but to find meaning, and that life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or for power, but a quest for meaning. People will sometimes endure suffering not because it becomes acceptable, still less beautiful, but because they can still fasten it to a task, a promise, a responsibility, or to someone they refuse to abandon.

Here “beauty” has nothing to do with the camp itself. It clings instead to small, stubborn traces of value that refuse to die: a remembered line, a scrap of music hummed under the breath, the decision not to let every sense of worth be extinguished. That is a kind of beauty of resonance, a faint echo between an inner image and a possible future self, enough to keep someone from dropping into nothing. It does not redeem the horror. It keeps one human thread from snapping.

Somewhere between Esmé and The Fall there is also that tiny stop-motion film Lost & Found (2018): a crocheted dinosaur unravelling itself to drag a knitted fox out of danger, thread by thread, until nothing of its own body is left but a heap of yarn. Then comes the frantic, clumsy work by the fox of knitting it back together. The film withholds the easy consolation of a restored creature. The attempts fail, again and again, and we watch the fox go on knitting, stubbornly. Even if the fox were to succeed, what reappears would be necessarily imperfect: crooked, scarred, nothing like the original toy. That outcome is not the point. The beauty here does not lie in restoring an ideal form, but in the decision to come apart for the other and in the imperfect labor of trying to remake something that can exist again. That is the same beauty of resonance I feel in Esmé’s letter, in The Fall’s dying stuntman and stubborn child, in Arbus’s rooms, and in Frankl’s “will to meaning.” It has nothing to do with the beauty of power or the power of beauty as spectacle; it is simply a refusal to abandon the other to nothingness.

Riefenstahl and, often, Ishioka find beauty in purification: mess pressed into pattern, conflict dissolved into form. The stadium, the reef, the Běijīng ceremony, the crimson silhouettes in Dracula all offer the same reassurance. Whatever chaos lies behind them has been tamed into a single rhythm in which the eye can rest. The figures gathered around Arbus, Esmé, Frankl, and Lost & Found live in the opposite condition. Their beauty stands inside an unsolved mess and refuses to pretend it is anything else. That is the terrain where I place the beauty of resonance.

Jacques Zylberberg (1939–2010) gives that messy terrain another name: complexity. For him, complexity is not a knot to be cut through or disentangled, but an au-delà, a horizon that always recedes, held, when we are lucky, by a fragile triangle he called sagesse, lucidité, liberté: a kind of wisdom that still holds after horror has stripped away illusions, lucidity as the refusal of comforting lies, and freedom in the small, stubborn acts that still defy circumstance. In that light, the beauty of resonance is simply what appears when someone stands facing that horizon without editing it into purity: Arbus in a cramped room; Frankl trying not to let the inner eye go blind in the camp; the fox knitting on; the rare spectator who does not let the pattern drown out the scream. Set against that, my own position is narrower. This essay lives mostly in lucidity. It reaches, where it can, toward wisdom. As for freedom, it does very little. I know that, and I go on writing anyway, because I am not willing to give up the pleasures this position protects.

From Sade’s vantage, I am simply another person whose tastes and conscience cross in an untidy way and who would rather not examine the crossing for long. I am not outside the field I am describing. If this essay has a protagonist, she is neither Juliette nor Justine, but a woman sitting in the blue light of a screen, trying to make sense of the “unravelled” threads of these three lives.

I see myself now as the fox in Lost & Found, fumbling with the yarn of Riefenstahl’s symmetry, Ishioka’s vibrant armor, and Arbus’s exposed faces. I am knitting them into this text, not to restore them to some original, “pure” beauty, but to see if they can hold together a different kind of meaning. It is a clumsy, imperfect labor. The result is crooked, scarred by the history of the twentieth century and the complicities of the twenty-first.

I keep the Sadean scalpel on the desk because I need to remember the price of the patterns I admire. I am the spectator who has opened her own Pandora’s box and refused to close it. I go on knitting these sentences in the dark, well aware that the most impolite question is the one I must keep asking until the thread runs out: Who is enjoying what? What am I refusing to see in order to keep this beauty intact?

My own name belongs in that inventory along with everyone else’s.

Why does HMTC educate about the Holocaust?

Education about the Holocaust deals with the worldwide systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

When we delve into the Holocaust, it is extremely important to discuss the dangers of prejudice, discrimination, anti-Semitism and dehumanization. The Holocaust also reveals the full range of human responses—raising important considerations about societal and individual motivations and pressures that lead people to act as they do—or to not act at all. 

Holocaust education is essential for the following reasons:

• Preservation of memory: It honors the victims and ensures their stories are not forgotten.
• Understanding history and encourage students to think critically: It provides context for the events leading to the Holocaust, their impact on society, the ability to analyze propaganda, and recognize the dangers of hatred and intolerance.
• Combatting anti-Semitism: Education helps to challenge and reduce prejudice against Jewish communities.
• Promoting tolerance and inspiring action: It fosters empathy and respect among different cultures and religions, and empowers individuals to stand against anti-Semitism, injustice, and advocate for human rights.

HMTC’s mission is to:

Demonstrates the dangers of prejudice, racism, hatred, scapegoating, discrimination, dehumanization, and extreme anti-Semitism.

Demonstrates how a government can turn against a segment of society. This emphasizes the need for all, especially those in leadership positions, to reinforce humanistic values that protect and preserve free and just societies.
 

Highlights that there are no simple answers to complex problems. To understand how extremist ideologies and propaganda targeted hate and insight fear, peer pressure, indifference, greed, and resentment. 

Explore the actions of perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, upstanders, and victims. This can develop an awareness not only of how hate and violence take hold but also of the power of resistance, resilience and solidarity in local, national, and global contexts.

At HMTC we believe in a just and tolerant world and work to achieve this through our all of educational programs. Visit us at hmtcli.org.

I am a Holocaust survivor and a child of Holocaust survivors, born December 21, 1939, in the city of Czernowitz, Bukovina; then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Romania.

My parents and I were deported when I was only a-year-and-a-half-old and I have no memories of that period of time.My parents wanted their children to have a normal childhood and did not talk of our experiences. They did not want to burden us with those stories. For me, it’s a blessing in disguise. Because I don’t have to relive those whole stories like the older generations do every single day.

If you ask any survivor, “How come you’re alive today?” everybody will use one word: luck. There is no rhyme and no reason why somebody lived and somebody died—I survived.

I was never separated from my parents, but I was subjected to medical experiments. You will look at me and you will never know that I’m in constant pain. I have been, I am, and will be in pain every single second of my life.

From 1941 to 1944, my parents and I were in a labor camp and ghetto called Mogilyev-Podolskiy in what is now Ukraine, an area that was annexed by the Romanian Nazis who were the most brutal group of people. Very few people know about the Romanians’ brutality: for instance, they brought together 19,000 Jews from Odessa and burnt them alive. So very few people know about the cruelty of the Romanians. The camp was liberated by the Red Army in March of 1944, and my family and I made our way to a small town in Transylvania called Reghin and eventually emigrated to Israel in 1961 where I served as a mechanic in the Israeli Air Force.

One main reason I am alive today, my father once explained to me, is because a German woman saved my life. Not far away from the labor camp, there was a farm owned by Germans. She brought food to the guards in the SS, but when she saw the physical signs that I’m dying of starvation—big head, whole stomach, sore feet—at the risk of her entire family, she decided to give me milk, possibly more, but I did not ask my father more details. I don’t know the name of the person that saved my life, let alone why, but, in 2014, I went to Israel giving testimony at Yad Vashem and told her story.

I had a recurring nightmare that lasted for many years. In the nightmare, I was in the corner of a building. I was naked. The only lights and sounds I saw and heard were from the explosions outside. It made me feel like I was in a void and alone. But, today, because I tell my story, I know that is just a dream.

A few months ago, I was invited to speak at MS 447, a Queens public school. Then I learned that the principal denied me this invitation to speak to the kids. I don’t know her and the principal never talked to me, but, apparently, they have Muslim kids there, and they come to school with the kufiyeh and the principal claimed the PowerPoint presentation on my website was her reason for disinviting me. My PowerPoint presentation does not discuss the war in Gaza or Iran, but there is an Israeli flag in the background. I’m an Israeli. Why would I deny my heritage? So, for her, that was too political, but there was a big outcry, and the media was involved, and the superintendent overruled the principal, and I was allowed to speak there on February 5, 2026. The pushback was very important because somebody else will try to deny me or others the right to speak, and now they can use New York as an example of how to overcome that.

The Jewish people have a future everywhere, with one condition—and this is my mission in life—to educate the next generation; to motivate them to be the best they can be and empower them to become upstanders. All the tragedies in the world—genocides, the Holocaust—happened because most stood by and did nothing. And I want to teach them how the Holocaust happened. I go through the stages—that people did not react in time and it kept escalating. Knowledge without action means absolutely nothing, and they have to take the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., to march nationwide, to bring other ethnic groups with them, and to do it in a peaceful way, without violence. And because of the way Dr. King did it, bringing the media with him, many groundbreaking pieces of legislation have been passed. We must be united and fight for everybody.

When I talk about October 7, I was not surprised by the attack, because I had been saying for years, “Why did Israel expect different results using the same old tactics?” However, a lot of people compare it to the Holocaust because it was the worst atrocity inflicted on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. If you have to make comparisons, compare the Hamas brutality with ISIS, but not with the Holocaust. We have to be very careful with the words that we are using, as people use words too loosely, all kinds of words, and then those words become the norm; then we have to change the norm and we must speak with one voice. 

The Holocaust must be taught forever and ever. It is the best example of what hate can do to a person, a group of people, to a nation, to the world. The whole world was involved in trying to annihilate only one group of people, the Jews. Some Jews are offended when they see the Holocaust universalized, because, many people say, the Holocaust isn’t just the story of the murder of the Jews, but it’s the story of the killing of “everybody.” I say, “Please don’t compare it anything, because the Holocaust is a unique moment in history.”

Our enemies use one-word accusations­—“genocide,” “apartheid,” “colonialist”—and everybody hears it. We don’t have one word to which everybody can listen, as everybody usus a different word, and so our message is confusing. Therefore, nobody hears us and the media do not know what we’re standing for. Joseph Goebbels explained “the big lie,” and how the bigger the lie the more credible it becomes, and that’s exactly what our enemies are doing.

My mission is to educate the next generation. We have to educate the young people to be upstanders and not to be afraid to talk. Each child should have a very strong voice and each one can make a difference.

I have spoken with Holocaust deniers; for instance, a Pakistani woman who repeated that the IDF is committing genocide. She looked at me and said, “You are part of the problem.” That’s indoctrination. That’s why I start with first, second, and third graders. I talk about hate and bullying, and I start to speak with fourth graders about the Holocaust before they’re indoctrinated. BDS started on campuses, succeeded, then went to high school and succeeded. They are right now in middle schools. And, once the children are indoctrinated, it’s almost impossible to bring them to critical thinking.

I’ve spoken to between 350,000 and 400,000 people in my life; and, from the responses that I get, I know that they will make a difference, but it will take time as true change doesn’t happen suddenly. People will have to be educated, and eventually things will change, but it will get worse before it gets better.

I was also honored to light the torch as an Israeli for the rebirth of Israel one year for Independence Day. That was, so far, the highlight of my life.

I am an optimist, and I will die an optimist. We survived the Holocaust. We survived many other tragedies, and, when I talk to high school students, I remind them of Passover. In the Passover hagadah, there is the sentence that, in every generation, our enemies try to annihilate us, but, instead, their civilizations disappeared. We prevailed and will continue to, and I have a very strong message: we are here to stay, whether you like it or not.

Am Yisrael chai.

The work of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (HMTC) exists at the intersection of memory, moral responsibility, and democratic preservation. In an era increasingly defined by ideological extremism, algorithmic propaganda, and the normalization of hatred disguised as activism, the mission of Holocaust education has become not merely relevant, but indispensable.

Over the past year, HMTC has: held educational initiatives; public condemnations of anti-Semitism via words spoken at rallies and/or written words in press statements; interfaith programming; law enforcement partnerships and education; aiding and unveiling the bipartisan buffer zones SACRED (Safeguarding Access to Congregations and Religious Establishments from Disruption) Act; brought forward speakers from artists who refuse to remain silent such as Five for Fighting’s John Ondrasik and peace activists such as Moroccan Muslim Youseff El-Zahari, IDF lone soldiers Sam Fried and Ira Kohler (author of the newly released Once a Paratrooper), leading members of ZAKA including those who were on the ground on 10/7 collecting and identifying the bodies of innocent Israeli civilians massacred in their homes, shelters, and at the NOVA music festival; organized and moderated movie screenings with panel discussions and book releases that others may find too risky to bring to public attention; moderating eye opening conversations in our Humanity Matters podcast studio with activists such as Rawan Osman and Abraham Hamra, IDF lone soldiers, American veterans, historians, elected officials, and more; hosted tens of thousands of public, Catholic, Jewish, and private school students to tour our updated exhibits and hear survivor testimony; interviewed and recorded testimonies which have been nominated and presented at the Emmys year after year; and hosted community events and opportunities for people to come together and be inspired to take action—together—in a world that at times can feel hopeless. 

The combination of these events has collectively demonstrated an institution refusing complacency in the face of rising hate. This organization has emerged not only as a guardian of historical memory, but as an active civic force confronting the modern machinery of radicalization. 

The Holocaust is not a distant abstraction confined to black-and-white photographs or aging textbooks. It is the most meticulously documented example of what occurs when propaganda supplants truth, when democratic institutions erode under ideological pressure, and when ordinary citizens become conditioned to view moral silence as virtue. HMTC recognizes that the Holocaust cannot be taught solely as a chronology of atrocities; it must be taught as a warning. Its educational philosophy consistently emphasizes that genocide did not begin with gas chambers. It began with rhetoric. It began with social isolation, the legitimization of conspiracy theories, the normalization of public hatred, and the strategic dehumanization of an entire people. 

That lesson possesses extraordinary urgency today. 

Across universities, social media platforms, public demonstrations, and even K–12 school environments, there has been a disturbing resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric disguised as political sophistication or moral activism. Increasingly, individuals are pressured into believing that defending Jewish safety, acknowledging anti-Semitism, or standing against extremist hatred, somehow places them “on the wrong side of history.” This phenomenon bears a chilling resemblance to the atmosphere that developed throughout Europe during the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the 1930s, countless citizens were manipulated into believing that public solidarity with Jews represented opposition to progress, nationalism, or social stability. Through relentless propaganda, Jews were transformed into scapegoats for societal frustration, economic hardship, and political unrest. Fear of social ostracization silenced many who privately recognized the danger. This not only appears in the rise of Hitler but sadly goes back thousands of years and generation after generation, where it is simply simpler to blame a minority, in some cases for otherwise inexplicable events such as the Black Death (when people did not understand a bacterium pandemic and that the reason for lower numbers of Jews falling ill, was simply due to religious rituals such as hand washing). 

The parallels are impossible to ignore. 

Modern propaganda no longer relies solely upon state-controlled newspapers or radio broadcasts. It spreads instantaneously through viral videos, manipulated imagery, anonymous online networks, and emotionally charged misinformation campaigns designed to bypass rational analysis and provoke outrage. Young people, particularly those consuming information primarily through social media algorithms, are increasingly vulnerable to ideological indoctrination masquerading as justice-oriented discourse. The story has remained the same; only the cover has changed. Today, that cover often takes the form of false accusations against Israel, denying a single nation’s right to exist, and singling out Jews with suspicions of divided loyalty. 

HMTC’s educational and advocacy programs are therefore profoundly consequential because they equip individuals not merely with historical knowledge but with intellectual discernment. We teach students, educators, law enforcement officials, and community leaders how to identify propaganda, challenge dehumanization, and recognize the early warning signs of extremism.

Equally important is HMTC’s insistence upon preserving survivor testimony while survivors are still able to speak firsthand and supporting following generations (“2Gs” and “3Gs”) to carry it on. Survivor testimony represents one of the last remaining barriers against historical distortion and denial. Statistics alone cannot convey the psychological terror of exclusion, the trauma of displacement, or the consequences of societal indifference. A survivor standing before a classroom transforms history from abstraction into human reality. The testimony becomes irrefutable not simply because it is factual, but because it is personal. It forces listeners to confront the moral choices individuals and societies make during moments of crisis. When Holocaust survivors share with students that for the first time since the Holocaust—that they are scared for their and their families’ safety—it forces students and adults to pause, to take in the education we shared with them. 

Yet the passage of time presents an urgent challenge. As the survivor generation diminishes, HMTC carries an even greater responsibility: ensuring that testimony does not disappear into archival obscurity. Our role is not passive preservation. It is active transmission. We must continue translating historical memory into contemporary civic education that resonates with younger generations facing radically different technological and political realities. 

Our organization’s success is because of the collaborative efforts of dedicated staff, volunteer docents, board members, young leadership, Holocaust survivors and their descendants (2Gs, 3Gs, 4Gs), educators, and our many supporters and partners. 

What distinguishes HMTC’s work is its refusal to isolate anti-Semitism from the broader struggle for democratic resilience. HMTC consistently frames hatred not merely as a threat to Jews but as a threat to civil society itself. 

History demonstrates that anti-Semitism rarely exists independently; rather, it functions as an early indicator of democratic decay. Movements built upon anti-Semitic conspiracy theories frequently expand to target journalists, educators, immigrants, religious minorities, LGBTQ individuals, and political dissenters (at times, that includes many who participate in the initial Jew-hatred).

The ultimate objective of extremist radicalization is not solely hatred toward a specific group. It is destabilization—the erosion of trust in democratic institutions and in the fragmentation of social cohesion, as well as the weakening of family relationships and the replacement of pluralism with extremist ideology. 

This is why Holocaust education matters far beyond the Jewish community.

When HMTC educates students about the Holocaust, it is simultaneously educating future citizens about the fragility of democracy, the dangers of political extremism, and the ethical obligations of civic participation. When we publicly condemn acts of Jew-hate or hate symbolism, we reinforce societal boundaries that prevent normalization. When we collaborate with schools, police departments, interfaith leaders, and elected officials, we strengthen the communal infrastructure necessary to resist radicalization before violence escalates. 

Silence has never protected democracies. Avoidance has never neutralized extremism.

The instinct to retreat from uncomfortable conversations is precisely what allows hatred to metastasize beneath the surface of public life. HMTC’s relevance today stems from its willingness to confront these realities directly, even when doing so is controversial or politically inconvenient. 

Our center’s work ultimately affirms a profound truth: remembrance alone is insufficient without moral courage. To honor Holocaust victims requires more than memorialization. It requires vigilance against contemporary forms of hatred, resistance to propaganda regardless of its political packaging, and the willingness to defend democratic principles even when social pressure discourages doing so. In this sense, HMTC is not simply preserving history. It is safeguarding the ethical foundation upon which a free society depends.

Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column on alleged Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians appeared on May 11. The following day, the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children released Silenced No More, a 297-page report on sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 and against hostages in captivity. Yet public discussion quickly centered on Kristof’s column and the controversy around its most grotesque allegation, rather than on the Commission’s report.

That imbalance is consequential because the two texts do not belong to the same evidentiary order. Kristof’s column rests on 14 conversations (12 of them anonymous to the reader), partial corroboration, activist intermediaries, and the authority of the Times. The Civil Commission report represents two years of work, more than 430 testimonies and interviews, more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, and over 1,800 hours of visual analysis. Kristof’s column does not merely lack the evidentiary architecture of the Commission report; it shows how prestige media can turn a politicized sourcing chain into a public grandstand, where accusation performs as evidence before scrutiny can begin.

The timing also sharpened a lexical inversion. Kristof’s column appeared under the title “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” The following day, the Civil Commission released Silenced No More. Before the report could publicly define silence as the erasure of Israeli victims, Kristof had already turned the same moral keyword in the opposite direction. The effect was not merely rhetorical. It helped prepare the conditions in which the report would be received: as the Israeli counterpart to an accusation already placed before the public, rather than as a major evidentiary record demanding examination in its own right.

The title of the Commission’s report is therefore not incidental. Silenced No More announces an effort to restore the voices of victims whose suffering had been doubted, minimized, or treated as politically inconvenient. Kristof’s column, whatever its intention, helped reverse that work. By placing its own accusation before the report entered public discussion, it made the victims of October 7 easier to silence again through false equivalence.

The Civil Commission is an independent Israeli civil-society initiative that gathered, organized, and assessed evidence concerning sexual violence committed during the October 7 attacks and against hostages. Its report is not an op-ed, a polemical brief, or a newspaper investigation. It is structured as an evidentiary archive, with attention to testimony, visual material, forensic context, geolocation, source hierarchy, and cross-referencing.

Most readers will not open nearly 300 pages of documentation. They will absorb the easier pattern: Kristof alleges sexual violence against Palestinians; the Civil Commission documents sexual violence against Israelis; both sides accuse each other; both are political; both can be dismissed into the fog of mutual claim-making.

The danger lies there. A serious evidentiary report can be made unreadable before it is refuted. It need not be defeated by counter-evidence. It can be neutralized by the terms in which it is received.

Kristof cited Ehud Olmert, who said he believed such abuses happened and that war crimes were being committed in the territories. But Olmert did not corroborate the specific claims in the column, still less its most lurid allegation. Placement did the work that evidence had not done: it made a general statement by a former Israeli prime minister appear to authorize a set of particular accusations. Around the Civil Commission report, the same problem appears at scale. A serious document is not answered. It is absorbed into a symmetry created elsewhere.

The issue is methodological: how evidence was gathered, classified, cross-referenced, archived, and made available for scrutiny. What follows is a study of two architectures of credibility.

I. The Civil Commission’s Architecture of Evidence

The Civil Commission’s report makes grave claims. It concludes that sexual and gender-based violence was “systematic, widespread, and integral” to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath. It argues that such violence occurred across multiple locations and phases of the assault, including abduction, transfer, and captivity. It further claims that recurring tactics of sexual abuse and torture formed part of a broader operational method.

Those conclusions are attached to an evidentiary structure. The report states that its investigation reviewed more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to more than 1,800 cumulative hours of visual analysis. It also says the Commission conducted more than 430 formal and informal interviews, testimonies, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, returned hostages, experts, and family members.

The methodology is not merely quantitative. It includes site visits to attack locations such as Kibbutz Be’eri, Nir Oz, the Nova festival site, and Route 232; visits to the Abu Kabir National Forensic Center; forensic pathologist assessments; and review of body conditions. Its visual and digital materials include Hamas body-camera footage, surveillance footage, live text and audio recordings, and geolocation verification.

The report also describes the structure of its archive. Materials are logged, coded, mapped across time and geographic locations, and integrated into a database on sexual and gender-based crimes. It refers to a formal open-source investigation program drawing on news articles, documentaries, parliamentary hearings, official documents, social media, and geolocation databases.

The report declares a hierarchy of evidence. Its source structure gives primacy to perpetrators’ own video and body-camera footage, followed by survivor and witness testimony, then verified media and investigative reports. The Commission states that its factual determinations are cross-referenced across multiple independent sources and that no finding rests on a single source.

The reader need not accept every legal conclusion. The essential point is that the report gives the reader, the critic, the court, and the historian something to examine. Its claims are attached to an archive, a method, a hierarchy, and a declared process of cross-reference.

This is why the lazy response that the report is “Israeli propaganda” is insufficient. The report emerged from a wounded society. Of course it did. Its credibility depends on whether its claims are attached to testimony, images, chronology, forensic context, legal reasoning, and a method that can be tested.

No perspective removes the obligation to corroborate accusation with evidence.

II. Kristof’s Architecture of Accusation

Placed beside that structure, Kristof’s column is a different kind of text. It is not a report, archive, or legal submission. It is an opinion column written with the authority of a famous reporter and published by the most influential newspaper in the United States.

Kristof says his reporting is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. He explains that he found these alleged victims by asking lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers, and Palestinians themselves. In many cases, he says, it was not possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in full. Partial corroboration came through family members, lawyers, social workers, or others in whom they had confided. In other cases, he says, corroboration was not possible at all.

Those accounts warrant investigation. They do not justify the status Kristof gives them, still less the sweeping indictment he builds from them. Fourteen conversations, many anonymous or only partially identifiable to the reader, do not amount to the same evidentiary structure as a two-year project built from hundreds of testimonies, extensive visual analysis, site visits, forensic consultation, geolocation verification, archival indexing, and a declared source hierarchy.

The contrast is not only one of scale. Kristof cites no publicly examinable physical or forensic evidence capable of sustaining the column’s central accusation, much less its most grotesque allegation.

He cites no visual or digital evidence comparable to perpetrator footage, surveillance footage, geolocation-supported material, or structured visual analysis. He does not describe a formal evidentiary hierarchy. He does not clearly distinguish among first-hand testimony, activist reports, second-hand confidences, organizational claims, legal advocacy, and inference.

Nor are his institutional sources equivalent in evidentiary function. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, B’Tselem, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Save the Children are different kinds of organizations, with different mandates, methods, and political positions. Their appearance under separate names does not automatically create independent verification.

Advocacy alone is not the issue. Some of these sources belong to an information ecology in which accusations against Israel travel easily, while Hamas’s violence and coercion are treated evasively or not at all. Euro-Med, in particular, should not be treated as a neutral evidentiary channel, and Kristof’s mild description of it as an advocacy group “often critical of Israel” does not tell readers enough about the source he is asking them to trust. A detailed critique by Gerald M. Steinberg, president of the database NGO Monitor, in Quillette has traced Euro-Med’s role in Kristof’s column, its April 2026 report, and the earlier circulation of the “dog-rape” allegation. Institutional variety is not the same as independent verification. In Kristof’s column, corroboration often appears cumulative rather than structurally independent, with organizations already moving in the same accusatory direction made to resemble separate evidentiary checks.

Kristof’s column does more than report allegations. It turns under-corroborated claims into a public indictment, then lets the obscenity of the accusation conceal the evidentiary void beneath it. It turns those accounts into a claim of widespread Israeli sexual violence across institutions. Such a movement requires a stronger foundation than the column provides.

The dog-rape allegation is the clearest test. Kristof gives the reader an accusation of exceptional grotesqueness, then leaves it without the support such a claim demands. Its evidentiary status is never made proportionate to its symbolic force. A detail capable of transforming the accusatory force of the entire column is offered with no physical evidence, no forensic evidence, no visual evidence, no named witness available to the reader, and no clear independent corroboration. Nor does Kristof give readers enough information to test the allegation themselves: no documents, no dates precise enough for verification, no identifiable investigative record, no chain of custody, no forensic report, no source hierarchy.

The more extreme the allegation, the more disciplined the verification must be. In Kristof’s column, extremity is allowed to do work that evidence has not done.

Allegations of sexual violence can and should be reported when the evidentiary basis is clear. An allegation of this extremity, presented without publicly examinable corroboration, enters a different symbolic register. It begins to function less as evidence than as sexual rumor shielded by moralistic posture.

The dog allegation is central because it is not simply an under-corroborated claim. It belongs to a recognizable genre: sexual atrocity rumor attached to Jews, circulated before evidence can be tested and carried forward by righteous display.

Edgar Morin’s study of the Orléans rumor showed how sexual accusation can circulate as communal knowledge even without verifiable evidence, especially when it condenses fear, disgust, and moral panic into a single story. In 1969, Jewish shopkeepers in the French region of Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. No missing woman was ever found.

The history of anti-Semitic violence gives this failure a particular weight. Pogroms have often begun not with official decrees but with hearsay granted the status of moral knowledge: rumors about violated women, kidnapped children, hidden bodies, poisoned wells, ritual blood, and sexual corruption.

Such accusations do not need evidence to begin their work. They need circulation, credulity, and a public prepared to experience suspicion as virtue. Hearsay about sexual violation is never harmless in the history of anti-Semitism. Kristof’s dog allegation belongs to a history in which lurid sexual rumor does political work before verification can catch up.

Kristof cannot show that extraordinary scrutiny took place because the column provides no publicly examinable basis for it. The allegation is not evidence in any meaningful public sense. It is not anchored in documents, forensic material, identifiable records, named witnesses, or independently testable corroboration. Its function in the column is atmospheric: it supplies obscenity and turns rumor, in Morin’s sense, into a posture of moral authority. Through that movement, Israel is made to appear violent, obscene, and sexually monstrous before evidence has been made available for examination.

III. How False Equivalence Makes Evidence Unreadable

Sexual violence is too grave to be handled as tribal evidence. Any credible allegation deserves investigation, whoever the accused and whoever the victim. Consistency requires more than distributing suspicion evenly. It requires applying evidentiary standards evenly.

Equal scrutiny does not flatten the two texts. It reveals their difference.

Kristof’s column obscures that difference. Palestinian accusation is allowed to acquire evidentiary force through anonymity, partial corroboration, activist mediation, and the authority of the Times. Israeli evidence, by contrast, is received as already compromised by politics, even when it comes attached to an archive, a method, and a declared process of cross-reference.

False equivalence does not give both sides the same burden. It lowers the burden for accusation against Israel, then raises the burden for evidence produced on behalf of Israeli victims. Serious documentation is made to look like one more partisan claim, while a column built from accusation is allowed to behave like proof.

The necessary questions are basic. Who gathered the evidence? How was it preserved? What is direct testimony? What is inference? What has been cross-referenced? What is publicly available? What remains sealed? What is stated as fact, what is stated as probability, and what is being smuggled into the reader’s imagination through rhetoric?

These questions do not obstruct moral inquiry. They belong to it.

IV. Why the Difference Matters

Most readers will not parse these distinctions without help. They will not compare methodology sections, archive descriptions, source categories, evidentiary thresholds, U.N. references, legal conclusions, or source hierarchies. Instead, they will receive a cruder message: Kristof says Israelis sexually abuse Palestinians; the Civil Commission says Hamas sexually abused Israelis. Each side has victims, reports, and politics. Therefore, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The truth is not found halfway between a documented atrocity and an under-corroborated accusation. To call that middle ground “balance” is to abandon judgment while pretending to exercise it. Evidentiary credibility is the relevant measure here. One text gives the reader a method, an archive, and a trail of corroboration. The other asks anonymous accusation, partial corroboration, and tabloid obscenity to carry a national indictment. Treating them as equivalent reduces a serious investigation to one more partisan exhibit.

A related inversion now operates around the Commission report. In Kristof’s column, under-corroborated accusation is elevated into evidence-like authority; around the Commission report, substantiated testimony is reduced to partisan hearsay. Rumor rises, evidence sinks, and the public is invited to mistake the result for balance.

This is why the Commission report’s near-invisibility is not a side issue. The report does not merely add “the Israeli side” to a controversy. It was built to resist erasure, denial, and the reduction of documented sexual atrocity to partisan claim-making. Yet the frame Kristof helped install makes such a document easier to ignore. The more serious and demanding the report is, the less likely most readers are to enter it. It becomes, in the public imagination, one more exhibit in the fog of mutual accusation rather than evidence to be examined.

The Civil Commission report also makes strong claims about patterns, systems, and legal responsibility, and those claims should not remain abstract. It identifies 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, sexual torture, mutilation, deliberate shootings to the genital area, forced nudity, restraint, public display, digital dissemination, threats of forced marriage, sexual violence against boys and men, and kinocidal sexual violence, in which family bonds themselves were weaponized as instruments of terror. These claims may be debated at the level of legal classification and interpretation, but they are presented as findings arising from a documented corpus.

Kristof’s column moves differently. It collects accounts, attaches them to a language of system and policy, and ends by conscripting October 7 into its own accusation. Its final paragraph says: “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.”

The structure of that sentence matters. First, Kristof invokes October 7. Second, he invokes sexual violence against Israeli women, a subject with a documented evidentiary history, including survivor testimony, witness accounts, perpetrator footage, forensic debate, U.N. inquiries, and now a major Civil Commission archive. Third, he transfers the moral and evidentiary gravity of that history onto allegations for which his column does not provide a comparable evidentiary architecture. Israeli suffering becomes a credential for an under-corroborated indictment.

Whether or not this was intended, the effect is clear. Kristof’s column has helped make the Civil Commission’s rigorous report less visible, less readable, and easier to dismiss. It has placed an archive built for scrutiny inside a fog of reciprocal accusation, where evidence is made to look like counter-accusation and rigor is reduced to politics.

The answer to Kristof’s defenders should be clear: yes, scrutinize the Civil Commission report. But do not pretend that the evidence of sexual violence on October 7 has lived in some protected chamber of automatic belief. It has been questioned, parsed, challenged, minimized, and attacked almost from the first day after the massacre. The Civil Commission report enters a field already saturated with doubt, denial, U.N. inquiries, forensic debate, survivor testimony, perpetrator footage, and hostile interrogation.

Its answer is method: it preserves materials, identifies sources, describes its archive, states its categories, and makes its evidentiary structure available for examination. Those who call for equal scrutiny should accept that invitation rather than use “scrutiny” as a polite word for dismissal.

Kristof’s column deserves the same seriousness. Why were 14 conversations, many concealed from the reader, and drawn through a heavily politicized information ecology, allowed to support a sweeping claim about widespread Israeli sexual violence? Why were claims that could be corroborated only in part, and others that could not be corroborated at all, arranged into a national indictment? Why was aggregate corroboration from organizations moving in the same accusatory direction allowed to stand in for independent verification of individual accounts? Why was the most grotesque claim in the column published without publicly examinable extraordinary verification? Why was an opinion column allowed to behave like an evidentiary report while avoiding the disciplines such a report must bear?

If this is not named, serious evidence will keep losing to spectacle before it has even been read. The Civil Commission report is built to withstand rigorous examination. Kristof’s column asks accusation to masquerade as evidence. Under the cover of compassion, it performs the work of cancellation.

The dead and the raped are owed more than a freak show of accusation, more than the double erasure of what was done to them. They are owed the cold discipline of evidence.

Every Tuesday night in Manhattan, a circle of chairs was arranged to hold a universe of intersecting worlds. Around the table sat a remarkably diverse group: four older adults born into the thick of the Second World War, and ten New York City high school students hailing from a kaleidoscope of backgrounds; Black, BIPOC, Latino, German, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and non-Jewish.

On our very first evening together, the air was dense with the palpable hesitation that always accompanies an encounter with profound historical trauma. Many participants were visibly wary of the immense emotional and temporal commitment required for a project of this magnitude. Breaking through this tentative atmosphere was Robert Nussbaum. Robert, the eldest of our older adults and a survivor from Budapest, Hungary, possessed an innate charisma that quickly established him as the “social glue” of our ensemble. With an abrupt, refreshing lack of political correctness, he looked across the circle at the teenagers and asked: “Well, I’d like to know, why are you here?”

What followed was a uniquely sincere, fascinating conversation that set the tone for the next eight months. Some students spoke of deep family roots that have gone through the Holocaust. Others, who were not Jewish at all, explained with striking vulnerability that they simply wanted to understand the intimate history of another people. Yet, the hesitation did not vanish instantly. 

Cordula Hahn, whose parents had fled Czechoslovakia for the Netherlands immediately following Kristallnacht, and who was herself born into the complicated life of a toddler during the war, looked at the group and admitted: “I am really not quite sure I want to be here. I don’t know if I want to live the Holocaust every day.” And yet, Cordula kept coming back. 

I recognized that this was the first major victory of the process. Something within our evolving therapeutic and communal framework was already powerful enough to hold all the ambiguity, resistance, and doubt of its members, slowly weaving a safety net capable of catching every participant.

Inherited Legacies + Sacred Script

After years of grappling with my identities as an Israeli-Jewish drama therapist living in the U.S., and a third-generation descendant of the Holocaust, I found myself joining Witness Theater, an extraordinary intergenerational drama therapy program that brings together Holocaust survivors and high school youth to sit in community, learn, and transform personal survival testimonies into a shared public performance of collective remembrance. As a professional theater director and drama therapist, this was an unavoidable convergence of my personal, theatrical, and clinical worlds.

My maternal grandfather, Zeev Shwartz (later Zeev Shehory) was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was persecuted as a young child, witnessing the systematic tearing apart of his community. Many of his siblings and extended family members were murdered by Hitler’s regime. Like many others he endured the terrifying reality written by the Nazis and ultimately ended up in Auschwitz, where his identity was reduced to a number etched permanently into his skin. He survived the ghettos and camps by raw luck and enduring grueling forced labor, peeling oranges for Nazi officers. He stayed alive by nourishing his growing body with the thin string of bitter pith and peel left behind. 

This desperate hunger and the haunting weight of survival did not vanish with liberation; they became an invisible inheritance. My grandfather passed away when my mother was only seven years old, meaning I never had the chance to meet him or hear his voice. Yet, like so many other surviving Jewish families, we learned that trauma does not require a physical presence to travel across generations.

The Power of Language + Intergenerational Bridges

From our very first session, we made a deliberate choice to refer to our older participants as “adults” rather than survivors. While “survivor” honors incredible endurance, it can inadvertently flatten a person’s identity; calling them adults honored the rich, multifaceted lives they built after 1945, ensuring they were recognized as whole people rather than solely by the catastrophes of their childhoods. This year, our core group consisted of four remarkable individuals: Cordula Hahn, Robert Nussbaum, Eugene Ginter, and Lisa Holzkenner. During the war, they were all young children between the ages of two and seven—a haunting reality that constantly resurfaced in our discussions and ultimately became the leading narrative of our play.

Meeting them across a seventy-year age gap were ten brave high school students. This vast chronological divide was quietly compressed into nothingness through weekly interactions. Rather than looking up to the adults as static historical monuments, the students formed genuine, fluid relationships marked by mutual honor, spontaneous laughter, and deep identification. Driven by a youth population that proved boundlessly inquisitive and emotionally sensitive, this profound coming together of generations transformed historical distance into a deeply shared experience.

Trauma-Informed Frameworks + Aesthetic Distance

Operating under a trauma-informed lens, it was clear that throwing these two distinct populations into a room together without scaffolded preparation would be irresponsible. Before the joint sessions could safely commence, specialized workshops were held for the high school students alone, establishing a container for what was to come.

First, the teenagers covered the necessary parameters of Holocaust history, anchoring themselves in the structural context required to hold the testimonies they were about to receive. From there, the preparation deepened into an intensive workshop on the nature of psychological trauma. The students learned how trauma physically manifests in a room. How it can show up as a sudden silence, hyperarousal, emotional flooding, or a quiet somatic collapsing. Together, actionable strategies were mapped out: how to recognize when an adult was becoming overwhelmed, how to offer grounded, steady support, and critically, how the students could protect and honor their own psychological boundaries. 

Safeguarding the students’ mental health was just as important as honoring the adults, especially as they took on the heavy mantle of staging these complex testimonies. We utilized the drama therapy principle of aesthetic distance to maintain a healthy boundary between the student’s reality (“Me”) and their dramatic persona (“Not-Me”). Through intentional role-induction and de-roling rituals, we kept them in a therapeutic balance, allowing them to step deeply into history without becoming emotionally flooded.

From Story Sharing to Embodied Staging

Our eight-month journey was divided into distinct, sequential phases. The initial phase focused entirely on group building to establish a profound sense of safety. Once this container was secure, we moved into a ten-week story-sharing phase. Each week, the adults unfolded a different “chapter” of their lives, tracing their lineages from pre-war family history through the depths of the Holocaust and into their modern lives in New York.

In these sessions, students were explicitly cast in the active role of interviewers rather than passive consumers of trauma. By asking intuitive and purely curious questions, they co-created the space, while the rest of the circle practiced active listening. For some of these multicultural students, this project was their very first encounter with the historical reality of the Holocaust, and for the adults, an intense feeling of community and shared experiences was formed. Many wept, hugged, and continued endless conversations about the atrocities our adults endured as young children.

At the conclusion of each verbal session, we moved onto our feet, utilizing drama therapy interventions like embodiment, psychodrama, and dramatic sculpting to stage a chosen scene from that day’s testimony. Crucially, the adults held directorial agency, while I quietly provided the therapeutic scaffolding to ensure everyone remained grounded and emotionally secure. They cast the students to play figures from their memories, directed the physical staging, and chose whether to physically participate or observe from an aesthetic distance.

From a trauma-informed perspective, this is profoundly empowering. Trauma strips an individual of control, rendering them a helpless object to external cruelty. By stepping into the role of director, the adult retrieves the power to navigate and mold their own narrative, physically changing the internal script of their trauma. Two specific vignettes illustrate this clinical transformation.

The first centers on Eugene Ginter, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and tattooed as a mere four-year-old. Though he and his father managed to miraculously stay alongside each other during their time at the camp, they were torn apart during the chaos of the death march near liberation, leaving five-year-old Eugene to survive the front lines alone. Reunited with his mother at age six, they traveled through active minefields until they finally found his father working on a post-war farm. Eugene recalled that the war didn’t truly end for him until that morning when he crawled into bed and snuggled between both parents in absolute safety.

Recognizing a lifelong longing, I suggested we relive that moment through staging. Eugene took the directorial lead, casting a German student as his mother and another student as his father. Sitting in the center of the room, Eugene closed his eyes as the high school students replicated the somatic gestures he softly described: his father slightly squeezing his arm, and his mother gently rubbing his back. There, in the heart of Manhattan, 90-year-old Eugene felt the physical echo of protection from the parents he had not seen since they passed away.

Our second vignette involves Lisa Holzkenner, a psychoanalyst born into a respected, mystical Kabbalistic family in Morocco, whose father was a boxing champion and underground smuggler of Jewish youth. Despite spending decades clinically treating Holocaust survivors, the tailored safety of our drama therapy circle allowed Lisa to share an experience she had never told anyone before.

She recounted that as an eight-year-old girl, she was surrounded, beaten, and called a “dirty Jew” by neighborhood children. Beyond the physical trauma, the experience left her in a state of profound existential confusion, unable to square the violence with her grandfather’s spiritual teaching: “Do not hate, we are all the same blood.”

To process this buried memory, Lisa needed to watch it from an aesthetic distance. She directed the students to replay the scene, gradually adding historical and imaginary characters to rewrite the logic-less scenario she had internalized. Watching her redirect this memory was deeply therapeutic for the entire ensemble. The students witnessed healing in the making—a physical transition from tearful constriction to clear, dignified breathing and absolute narrative ownership.

Ultimately, this physical embodiment allowed the Adults to safely access and unlock memories that had been locked away, while casting the high school students allowed the youth to participate in a restorative act of deep empathy and compassion.

The Rehearsal Lab: Expanding the Role Repertoire

Once the story-sharing phase concluded, it was my responsibility to cultivate and weave these four distinct testimonies into a cohesive, original theater script. My objective as a playwright was to keep their historical truths completely intact, using dramatic structure and theatrical staging not just to educate, but to let these four specific, intimate lives echo the vast, collective magnitude of the Holocaust. 

The rehearsal period shifted our group dynamic from a fluid therapeutic circle into a highly focused, rigorous “work mode” that ultimately spanned over 150 hours. Yet, within this demanding process, the rehearsals became an active learning laboratory where students wrestled with complex historical storylines. They frequently asked intuitive questions, like why they needed to scream in a scene when the historical moment was silent; I explained that they were giving a theatrical voice to a child who, in 1943, could not afford to make a sound.

This intense artistic process allowed these teenagers, who were actively building their own real-life identities, to explore Robert Landy’s “role repertoire”—the diverse parts of the self we play in life. Within this shared, creative learning environment, they expanded their internal vocabulary of roles by stepping into the shoes of caregivers, historical oppressors, victims, and heroes. Meanwhile, the Adults retained full agency to “correct” our work, sharpening historical details and collaborating with me to rewrite scenes, ensuring they molded exactly how they wanted their lives portrayed on stage.

The Fifth Witness: Performing the Tapestry

Culminating the eight-month journey, The Fifth Witness brought the entire group, teens and adults, together on stage before packed audiences spotlighting directorial and therapeutic choices such as having the Adults physically on stage throughout the entire performance to symbolize absolute ownership of their stories. 

At carefully crafted moments, they stepped directly into the action to swap places with the students portraying their younger selves. In these moments, the student actors transitioned into “Doubles,” a psycho-dramatic concept where actors offer support that did not exist during the original experience, beautifully bridging biography and restorative performance. This theatrical world was further enriched by an original score composed by Lisa Holzkenner’s granddaughter, a continuous visual projection of family photographs, and historical vocal recordings of the Adults from their youth.

The audience too was not left behind and was given an active role in the performance, as in therapeutic theater, the audience is never a passive consumer; they were explicitly called upon to step into the sacred position of a collective witnessing body, providing the communal validation that historical trauma demands. The atmosphere was unapologetically intense, holding up the unvarnished horrors of the Holocaust while weaving in moments of playfulness and childhood humor. This creative duality sparked a profound transformation for both generations on stage. The adults found a liberating, restorative experience and the comforting certainty that their legacies were secure, while the high school students gained an internalized, lifelong sense of empathy and global responsibility.

What happened on that stage proves that to keep memory alive, education must move from the purely cognitive to the somatic and the relational. This is the precise promise of drama therapy in schools. By replacing passive, detached learning with active, trauma-informed exploration, we ensure that younger generations do not just view history as a static monument to the past. They deeply understand it, carry it with them, and become active partners in keeping the memory alive.

Witness Theater was conceived by Irit and Ezra Dagan and developed by JDC-Eshel in Israel. It was brought to New York in 2012 by Selfhelp Community Services, Inc. This year’s Witness Theater Program is a collaboration of Selfhelp, UJA-Federation of New York, and Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Joel Braverman High School. The program also receives generous support from Carol and Carl Hess, the Miriam and Arthur Diamond Charitable Trust, and the Kupferberg Foundation, with assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance.

What is an heirloom that your family treasures? Perhaps a seder plate, letters from war, a baseball glove, or even a tattered handwritten recipe. My family’s possession of my father’s detailed experience during World War II sat for over four decades before changing the course of my own story. That is my heirloom.

My father, Melvin Goldman, was a Holocaust survivor from Łódź, Poland. He did not talk about what he and his family had experienced and I did not know the depth of their suffering. My guess is he wanted to protect me from what he had lived through and witnessed. Growing up, I did not anticipate becoming an author, but an heirloom sitting in my mother’s closet eventually set me on a course to doing so, 20 years after my father’s passing.

Melvin’s Story

Melvin had the vision to preserve his life story onto 10 cassette tapes in the late 1970s. He bought a tape recorder and began giving his testimony in his office. It is an extraordinary story shrouded by the sounds of daily life. In the background, you can hear the phone and doorbell ringing. After a few brief pauses, Melvin proceeded once again to talk about his life. I’m not sure if it was cathartic for him, but he must have felt the importance of his story and I believe he intended to write a book at a future time. He never encouraged me to listen to what he recorded.

In 2015, my son Jason was accepted to study for a semester in Berlin. My family decided we would travel through Poland and trace some of my father’s steps. Jason encouraged me to listen to the tapes before we took our trip. I purchased a tape recorder and about 10 seconds into listening, I began to cry. I had not heard my father’s voice in almost 20 years. I soon realized that I had not only the preservation of his voice, but a detailed story of his life, and the lives of my family who were lost in the Holocaust. On one of the tapes, my father requested that someone put his story into a book. I had to honor his wishes.

My father was born Mieczysław Goldman on January 21, 1923, in Łódź, Poland. He was the oldest of seven children born to Chaim and Bajla Maria Goldman. My family had been in Poland for over 400 years. My grandfather owned a sheet metal factory and he forged custom ornamental products.

The Goldmans lived a typical Jewish life in Łódź. They attended the Stara Synagogue, kept kosher, attended school and work, vacationed in the summer, and participated in lots of activities in the city. There was anti-Semitism in Łódź and my father experienced it at school and on the soccer field. He heard racial slurs and he was beaten up on occasion, but it was accepted because there were 30 million Polish people and 1.5 million Jews.

Rumors began flying that Germany would take over Poland; though any believed this would not happen. Far from the truth. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. It was a swift and powerful takeover. They marched and drove in causing chaos and sheer terror. Part of Łódź was made into a ghetto. The city was occupied and used for its manufacturing and industry. The Goldmans were within the boundaries of the ghetto and they were able to remain in their house only after the Nazis looted and stole most of the contents.

Conditions worsened as time went on. No school, no medicine, and barely enough food to survive. Against his will, my father made hand warmers and belt buckles for the Nazis. My grandfather was a supervisor in a factory, and my grandmother made straw forms to fit over German soldiers’ boots to prevent frostbite. This continued for five long years until it was announced that the Łódź ghetto would be liquidated.

The Goldmans were ordered to take a few of their belongings and head to Radegast Station. Packed in a closed boxcar with little food or water, they slowly made their way to Auschwitz. They were greeted by Dr. Mengele, many guards, and aggressive dogs.

Mieczysław and his brother were sent one way and the rest of the family the other way. That was the last time Mieczyslaw ever saw his family again. He was separated from his brother because they were related. Mieczysław said that if you thought the ghetto was bad, think again. Auschwitz was horrendous. Beatings, killings, torture, and more slave labor. He suffered through dysentery.

At the Jewish holidays, there were extra beatings. Mieczysław had six teeth knocked out. He realized that if he didin’t have a plan, he would not get out of Auschwitz alive. He begged a guard to put him on a transport to another camp and this began a series of death marches and difficult train rides to other camps for yet more slave labor.

The last stop for Mieczysław was a subcamp of Neuengamme. The Germans knew the Allies were close and they began running off. The 82nd Airborne Division came through and found what was left of the prisoners lying in a field. Mieczysław was one of them. He was immediately taken by ambulance to be treated for a collapsed lung and active tuberculosis. My father was a skeleton who weighed fewer than 85 pounds.

Mieczysław spent time recuperating in numerous hospitals. He also had to prove he could be a responsible citizen who could care for himself and manage independently. This consisted of training so he could find a job. He focused on metal work. Over five years later, Mieczysław chose to relocate to the United States where he felt he would be accepted. He looked back at the kindness of the soldiers, doctors, and nurses who liberated and cared for him and he felt grateful. On December 31, 1951, Melvin came to Pittsburgh to start his new life. He began working and learning English. He rented a room for himself and met Mildred, who lived in the same house. My parents married in March of 1954. Melvin received citizenship in 1956 in what he called one of the best days of his life.

After holding many jobs, my father’s next goal was to fulfill a dream he had: starting his own business. My parents opened up a jewelry store in the early 1960s. Melvin took classes through the Gemological Institute of America and he became a talented, creative, well-respected jeweler. My father crafted many pieces for customers for over 25 years and I think he did this custom work so he could bring joy to people. My father, nearing retirement, ultimately decided to close the business in 1988. He had health issues from after the war that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Every doctor he saw told him all of his illnesses were related to what he experienced during the war. The compensation for which he fought and finally received was a mere pittance in comparison to his pain, suffering, and medical bills. But, receiving this small pension after so many years was a win for Melvin.

My father lived long enough to see me marry John Kikel. It was a good fit for all of us. And then, the best thing that could happen was having my son, Jason. This was a blessing for my father who had lost almost everyone in his life at a very early age. Jason was a breath of fresh air for Melvin. And, once he realized this new baby would not break, they began to spend a great deal of time together. It was amazing seeing my father on the floor playing with his grandson. It brought so much joy to him and also hope that the world could be a better place. My father passed away in 1996 on one of his favorite holidays, Sukkot. I felt sad that Jason was only four-years-old when his grandfather died. He doesn’t have many memories of him, but I can say that Melvin would certainly be proud of what Jason has accomplished and what he is doing with his life.

Back to 2015. My husband, son, and I traveled to Poland, where I immediately began journaling. The Goldman house and factory were gone and a lovely park sits on the property. We found the apartment building where a young woman hid books in the ghetto for neighbors who wanted to read. My father would sneak out after curfew to borrow some of her books. His mother was terrified he might be caught but I believe he read these books to educate himself and to escape what was happening in his world.

We took a small group tour to Auschwitz. I displaced myself so I could take the tour. My emotions were running wild. I worried about my husband and my son. The sadness can overtake you. It overtook me. I lost so much of my family at this death camp. The grandparents I never got to meet and all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins of whom my father spoke. The traditions we could have had. The celebrations and little things such as Shabbat dinners, shared conversations, and interactions with family members who were lost. This trip to Łódź brought me closer than ever to my father, but it also left me with many questions about anti-Semitism, hate, war, and my family.

Becoming an Author

My intention over 10 years ago was to begin giving presentations about my father’s remarkable life. I stalled. I was not comfortable speaking to any kind of audience and I could not gather my thoughts. My circumstances changed dramatically in 2015, after realizing I would be writing a book.

Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America came out in 2019. That was four years after I began writing. The first part of my book is all in my father’s words, so it is his memoir. Part two of my book includes my memories of growing up and adding what my father did after retirement. Part three is a large appendix which chronicles my father’s journey in various camps and hospitals, and also includes photos, maps, postcards from friends he made after the war who moved on with their lives, and lots of documentation.

Since my book came out, I have spoken to a variety of audiences to tell my father’s story. Over the years, these have included universities, libraries, historical societies, church groups, schools, and book clubs; even the Folsom Prison book club. Over 50 Inmates read my book and we had a Q&A discussion about Melvin’s life. Many of the participants told me how much they appreciated Melvin’s tenacity and hope. For those eligible for parole, they will be able to submit reflections on character, ethics, and perseverance based on what they learned.

I’ve enjoyed being able to engage with higher education, making appearances on a handful of campuses for keynotes and a variety of lectures with students and the public. As a result of these experiences, my son and I are currently developing a non-profit foundation to bring multi-disciplinary Holocaust and genocide education to the next generation.

I became a generations speaker for the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh a few years ago which opened more doors to presenting at more schools. I have taught lifelong learning classes and my book is being used in the curriculum at a few universities.

In 2021, a Pittsburgh-based theater company adapted my book into a play, Perseverance, which had its premiere in 2023 and just debuted in Canada this spring. Perseverance is a creative way to tell the story of my father and my family. The audience was able to connect with the characters and feel a level of tangibility. The initial performance was recorded and has been used as a global classroom with students on multiple continents coming together virtually to discuss their thoughts and feelings about the Holocaust and other genocides.

A cyber charter school in Pennsylvania produces a series of short documentary films called Moments in History. After giving a presentation to the school’s students, I was invited to participate in the film series and share my father’s story. The short film had its debut on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2024. This emotional, impactful film later won an Emmy Award from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Over the years, some of my audiences have brought up similar questions and comments. Many recurring thoughts are about my father’s faith and ability to survive torture and loss, my thoughts on anti-Semitism and the world today, and inquiries about Holocaust denial.

Audiences of all ages, demographics, and backgrounds have arrived at these questions, teaching me that others are curious about my father’s own resilience while concerned about inherited trauma and combating hatred going forward. I answer that my grandparents instilled many wonderful qualities in my father; that helped him carry on in the worst of times and also inspired him to have hope and perseverance. My father never lost his faith. He was a quietly religious man with good values and morals. Anti-Semitism goes back thousands of years, and it began long before World War II. I tell my family’s story and I encourage listeners to seek out other survivors’ stories.

The realization that the Holocaust affected my family so deeply has increased my awareness about anti-Semitism, hate, and genocide. The older I get, the more I feel the need to talk about what happened. I feel scared at times. Some of the rhetoric is hard to imagine, and it incites people to behave in terrifying and disappointing ways.

Final Thoughts

As I give more presentations, I feel an increased weight on my shoulders to tell my family’s story, which is important so we keep past history in the forefront. It is difficult for many to understand or relate to events that happened over 80 years ago, so I encourage others to look at what is happening in the world today. Bigotry, hatred, and genocide are found around the world and identifying them does not require extensive effort.

There has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitism. A surge in incidents came after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. This spike is not temporary. It has been noted by the ADL that, in 2024, there were over 9,000 incidents which was up 5% from 2023. That is a 344% increase over the past five years. Anti-Semitic assaults are on the rise which include attacks on individuals as well as synagogues. We see trends which show a rise of anti-Semitism worldwide.

There is violent rhetoric on social media which makes Jews feel less safe. It is just another way of spreading hate and falsehoods. This does not stop with just Jews. It continues to impact other communities and we all need to use our voices to address what is happening. 

We can find positive ways to work with one another by listening, learning, sharing beliefs, being more open-minded, and becoming more productive. Be an upstander. Speak up when you see or hear something unkind. From what I have seen in my many presentations, panel discussions, and programs I have attended, I have hope for a better future.

I will continue to tell my family’s story for as long as I can. I am going to share other people’s stories as well. Jewish people say we die twice: the first time is when our hearts stop beating, the second time is when our name is spoken for the last time.

My father said he hoped the world will wake up. It is important for me to keep the Goldmans’ memories alive by telling their stories. Human beings were targeted because they were Jews, deemed undesirable, or did not fit into the strict social hierarchy of the time. It is imperative to keep their humanity and memory in mind.

The Holocaust has come full circle. Given its common meaning—the mass murder of six million Jews—that’s not something to celebrate. It’s always best to put as much distance as possible between an atrocity and more normalized surroundings. New generations should view the Holocaust as ancient history, and not as a current event.

I am in no way suggesting a repeat performance, a long-awaited sequel, a genocidal do-over. Yet, the killing, marginalization, and harassment of Jews worldwide has never been greater than it has been these last several years—except for when the Holocaust itself was in progress. Statistics don’t lie: wherever one looks, anti-Semitism is on a steep rise, going viral, and becoming increasingly violent. There is no longer anything virtual or secretly aspirational about it.

It’s not so much that harming Jews—wherever they might be found—seems to be on the minds of many. It’s that it’s on the lips of a not insignificant number of anti-Semites who would like nothing more than to have another go at the Final Solution. 

A congressional candidate in Texas recently proposed placing American Zionists in concentration camps where they would be castrated because, it goes without saying, most Zionists are pedophiles. Of course, most American Jews are Zionists. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for uncastrated American Jews. 

We’re not quite yet at the Auschwitz stage of American history, but if street life is any indicator, the immediate future for Jews doesn’t look promising. Anti-Semites are proudly filming themselves in the act of threatening Jews—creating evidence of hate crimes and leaving them red-handed. They are seen shouting slurs. Demanding that Jews all return to Israel. When Islamists are caught on video making such threats, their landing destination for Jews is Poland. Doctors and nurses, mostly Muslims, openly declaring on social media they have no intention treating Jews—just killing them!

Here’s an ambition you didn’t expect to hear again: Making good on bringing the Holocaust back from the dead. What’s most alarming is that such murderous talk is no longer a risky bet. It’s fairly consequence free. And it doesn’t require a whispering campaign or a secret handshake. Islamist cells are no longer asleep. They are fully functioning in broad daylight. The plotting of Jew-hatred has gone acoustic, proudly proclaimed without fear or favor. 

Where is all that rage-filled fury coming from? How did it go from dormancy to operational readiness so quickly? And why is it being so openly manifested without any societal backlash?

It is true that the entire concept of “behind closed doors” no longer exists; it’s become obliterated by the prying gaze of social media. Nothing is worth doing if it isn’t being posted for friends and followers—even if it involves threatening to harm people. But aren’t there still some things best left unsaid?

There’s no reticence about how one is presented on social media. All inhibitions somehow disappear. There’s a casual acceptance of depravity—on display for all the world to see. Many end up losing their jobs when Human Resource Departments discover evidence of an employee’s not-so-secret private life. It’s only a job loss. It can’t possibly compare with the morally justified obsession with dead Jews. 

Just look at the social media rantings of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife. She glorifies terrorists and downplays the sexual violence committed against Israeli teenagers on October 7, 2023. The mayor shrugged off the First Lady’s un-deleted revelations of her heart of anti-Semitic darkness. She’s a private citizen, the mayor reminded us. She has every right to make her private thoughts public. Yet shouldn’t he be worried about his political future?  Obviously, he has been made to believe that he won’t pay a price. And he’s probably right. 

But the sheer shamelessness of it all. Today’s anti-Semites don’t hide behind euphemistic language—the brilliant brainchild of the Nazis that made their war against the Jews appear innocuous.

“The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” didn’t quite conjure the otherworldly image of exterminating Jews—from the planet. “Delousing” didn’t sound like gassing. “Resettlement” did not prefigure concentration camps. “Ramp duty” was especially vague. How would anyone know it meant dividing Jews into two lines: one that resulted in a shaved head, branded arm, and months of miserable toil until succumbing to a certain death; and the other—reserved for children and frail adults—a fast track to the gas chambers and crematoria.

No beating around the barbed-wire for today’s Nazi idol-worshippers. You have to give them credit for their directness—a frankness about aims that would have startled Adolf Hitler himself.

Signs carried during marches in the major capitals of Europe, Australia, and Canada literally read: “Kill the Jews.” They freely chant: “Jewish scum: Go back to the gas chambers.” In London, cars circle Hyde Park as loudspeakers repeat: “Rape Jewish daughters!” Islamists march to this bit of ghoulish Arabic malfeasance, “Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud, jaysh Muhammad sa ya‘ud!” Translation: “Khaibar, Khaibar, o Jews, the army of Muhammad will return!” Khaibar refers to a seventh‑century Arabian oasis where the first generation of Muslims massacred Jewish tribes.  

Never once has Islam shown itself to be a “religion of peace.”

No other people romanticize the past quite like Islamists. The mere mention of the Umayyad Caliphate makes certain Muslims go mental—even though it’s a throwback to the eighth century. No wonder so many Muslim-majority countries are stymied by a lack of civilizational progress. Their minds are preoccupied with the more recent Islamist expansions into the Western World, which requires traveling back in time to 1517.

This partly explains why Israel’s success story—in the middle of the Middle East; the backyard where the vast majority of Muslims live—is so galling and thwarts all talk of peaceful coexistence. 

So, instead, perchance to dream of Jewish genocide—but to do so fully awake. Chanting “From the River to the Sea” is no longer a euphemistic mystery. College students and pink-haired progressives may still not know precisely which river and what sea the lyric is referring to—or what continent we are even talking about—but they are pretty sure that it’s an unambiguous clarion call to kill Jews with moral justification. 

The Islamist who murdered the two young embassy workers outside the Jewish Museum in Washinton, D.C., a year ago did not run from the crime scene. He waited to be apprehended and then calmly confessed, “Free Palestine,” as if such phrasing, in a world where criminal accountability is in freefall, was tantamount to a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. The same was true of the Boulder, Colorado, flame-thrower. He, too, saw no reason to flee, especially without first announcing the virtuous nature of his deed. 

“Free Palestine” is casually invoked as if congratulations are in order, an anticipatory triumph of the kill. 

Thoughts of another Holocaust registers no shock value. A bitter irony because for the first 25 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the word didn’t yet exist—largely because no one wanted to discuss it. Survivors were trying to rebuild their lives and not recall their near deaths. And those who wished to tell their stories were told that such graphic material was an unsuitable downer amid all the post-war euphoria. 

Many survivors didn’t even discuss it with their own children. (My parents fell into this category.) Any recollections of such incalculable loss was too traumatic. And what kind of a fresh start could the children of survivors expect to enjoy if tragic tales of the extinguished European pasts of their parents were carried around with them to Little League baseball games and stopovers at Dairy Queen?

Books had not yet been written or movies made about the uncensored Holocaust. Anne Frank’s diary (first published in 1947, with the Broadway play premiering in 1955, and the film in 1959), with its universalist message and sanguine sign-off—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—was an especially limited revelation. After all, the book provides no glimpse into all that was taking place outside of that Dutch attic. We learn a lot about the inner life of this precocious Jewish teen living under great distress in a capsizing world. But she didn’t know where she was going to end up, couldn’t comprehend the monstrosities that awaited her.

For the first few decades, it was nearly impossible to get a true sense of what had happened to two-thirds of European Jewry. Even history books were in no rush to reach the shelves, as if processing the enormity of it all would require more time.

Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) was perhaps the first artistic work to explore the damaged psyche of the survivors. It wasn’t until the TV mini-series Holocaust (1978)—starring a very young Meryl Streep and James Woods—that the word itself entered the popular lexicon and where the event was first introduced to a national audience on network television. 

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Holocaust, and the testimonies of the survivor community, became more widely known. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), which took home seven Oscar wins on 12 nominations, was certainly a catalyst. It even became a set-piece for an episode of Seinfeld. Throughout the decade, the Best Documentary Oscar always seemed to involve a re-telling of the Holocaust.

These artistic endeavors largely trivialized the scale and magnitude of the Holocaust, however. But many believed it was better to provide audiences with something representational—even if tritely presented—otherwise they might know nothing at all. The Holocaust went from the un-mentionable and unimaginable to full-blown technicolor on silver screens. 

The Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington, D.C, to overflowing crowds. Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal became cultural figures. There was mandatory Holocaust education in public schools. The profits from “Schindler’s List” were set aside to establish the Shoah Foundation, which videotaped the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. What better way to hear the unspeakable than through the recorded voices and pained facial expressions of those who were actually there—stored away for posterity. 

From 1994 through 2000, over 52,000 videotape recordings were produced, all of which now exist at the University of Southern California. Another 4,400 video recordings are housed at Yale University as part of its Fortunoff Video Archive.

During that time period, one would be hard pressed to find themselves at a cocktail party where the Holocaust was not mentioned at all. Having something poignant to say about the Shoah became fashionable. What was once subjected to deafening silence, improbably, became the talk of the town. 

And then, somewhere into the 21st century, suddenly, as if all that tape had been rewound and then erased, no sound at all—just silence, again.

In this era of identity politics, the Holocaust, cruelly, lost its identity. It was perceived as an altogether wrong storyline. Intersectional alliances that pitted white against persons of color, oppressors against the oppressed, free-market capitalists against socially democratic progressives, nudged the Holocaust out of the historical and political discussion. It disappeared from regular discourse. Many viewed the Holocaust as special pleading for the very people who deserved no public sympathy at all.

Jews were seen as white, privileged, and having outsized influence over a wide variety of centers of power: banking, Wall Street, the entertainment industry, and, of course, governmental decision-making—especially when it came to Israel.

Speaking of the Jewish state, despite it being the lone democracy in the Middle East with a diverse population and civil rights and free speech for all, it was accused of perpetrating a panoply of original sins. All the greatest hits in the catalogue of crimes against humanity were found in a state the size of New Jersey: “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “sexual violence,” “land theft,” “cultural appropriation,” and, of course, “settler colonialism.”

How did the people of Israel find the time to engage in such malignancies while blooming the desert, desalinating the ocean, innovating numerous high- and bio-tech wonders, winning disproportionate numbers of Nobel Prizes, 20 Summer Olympic Medals and four Eurovision Song Contests? Oh, and along the way they fought multiple defensive wars that all ended in Israeli victories.

In Western universities, the Holocaust was taken off the syllabus. And Holocaust education was yanked from public schools. One Oberlin professor opined—seconded by media personality Whoopi Goldberg—that the Holocaust was easily dismissed as “white-on-white crime”—which thus didn’t qualify as a crime at all.

Jews were being told in no uncertain terms to stop playing the Holocaust card. The world no longer wanted to hear about it. Centuries of suffering was now old news—a history that anti-Semites had taken the liberty of re-writing.

Now it is not the Nazis, but Jews who are the perpetrators of genocide. Not South Africa, but Jews are maintaining an apartheid state. Not the Hutus of Rwanda, but Israelis are the instigators of ethnic cleansing. Not the British Empire or the French, Belgian, and Dutch conquerors of Africa, but Israelis who epitomize the evils of settler colonialism. 

Biblical Jews are considered a complete fabrication. We all know that Jews commenced their trespass on Arab land from such far-flung places as Warsaw, Brooklyn, Miami Beach, Skokie, and the Fairfax District of Los Angeles.

The Holocaust could no longer be claimed as a source of sympathy for Jews. It had been bequeathed to the Palestinians. The genocide against the Jews is now being weaponized against Israel on behalf of Palestinians—even though its population has more than tripled since the “Occupation.” More stunningly, it has even increased since the war that Hamas started on October 7, 2023. The outcome was yet another Israeli military victory, but a loss on the front lines of public relations. The word genocide is now widely associated with the one state that owes its very existence to the granddaddy of all genocides. And given Gaza’s population surge, Israel is the most dismally ineffective perpetrator of genocide in human history.

It has gotten so bad that in order to maintain any semblance of social acceptance, Jews are required to publicly denounce Israel. They must also downplay their Judaism lest they wish to stand out as targets. In cities such as London, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, Barcelona, Melbourne, and Toronto, Jews have hung up their skullcaps and Star of David necklaces. Hasidic Jews have become especially vulnerable in subways and deserted streets. 

For all the power Jews purportedly possess, why is none of it safeguarding the tribe? The Holocaust is not only a forbidden topic; the genocide of the Jews is now a full-fledged taint.

The District Attorney for San Jose, California, Jeff Rosen, was forced to step down from prosecuting a case against Stanford University students who protested the war in Gaza by occupying the university president’s office. The recusal was ostensibly about his conflict of interest in having raised money for his re-election campaign by stating that he was fighting anti-Semitism. But a lingering question remains: how much of the judge’s decision rests on the fact that Rosen is the son of a Bergen-Belson Holocaust survivor?

Is now having a direct, familial connection to the worst crime committed against the Jewish people a disqualification in prosecuting anti-Semitism? Rosen’s capacity for impartially is being questioned. He can’t remain objective if anti-Semitism is being alleged. He can’t be trusted to prosecute pro-Hamas agitators fairly if his father was Holocaust survivor. 

The Stanford students were not charged with a hate crime, however. Rosen indicted them for felony vandalism. Their hatred for Jews would be excludable as evidence. And yet now it seems that Rosen’s family history may cause him to lose his bid for re-election.

The Holocaust, in the original Greek, refers to a burnt sacrifice—fire. Now the word is simply radioactive, a forbidden topic, and a sign of possible prejudice.

The antidote to this newly imposed silence about the Holocaust is testimony. Crack open the archives at USC and Yale. Invite neighbors to your home to watch The Pawnbroker, Au revoir les enfants (1987), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). 

Amplify the voices of the dwindling number of survivors. And let’s hear from their children and grandchildren. That’s precisely what we have done with this special Holocaust issue of the White Rose. If the stench of the camps found its way into your DNA, then you have the moral authority—the tribal duty—to speak. We also unveil new strategies in restoring Holocaust education.

Do not succumb to this pernicious moral crime of turning the Holocaust against the Jewish people. Transforming Holocaust memory into an armband of dishonor. Demanding an apology from the very people who are forever owed one.

I used to say that I was obsessed with the Holocaust. Kind of a curious thing to say, I know—but as the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors who never spoke about their experiences, I was desperate to know what they had gone through, to try to make sense of the incomprehensible.

My grandparents, Goldie and Al, had been childhood sweethearts in their hometown of Nove Davidkovo, a small village near Munkács, Czechoslovakia. I knew that Goldie survived Auschwitz, Al survived Hungarian labor camps, and my father, Marty, was born in a DP camp in Germany after the war, but that was about it. I knew I had lost countless relatives—great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, cousins—and didn’t know any other third generation survivors (“3G”) outside of my own family. 

I was entirely on my own in my quest to learn, so in typical firstborn-daughter-overachiever fashion I devoured every book, film, and testimony I could get my hands on, and even visited Auschwitz in an attempt to fill the void. I learned so much and felt connected to the stories and the people in them—Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi—but somehow I felt even less connected to my own.

And yet, even with these gaping holes in my family history, I have always felt my 3G-ness in every fiber of my being—literally and figuratively—even if I didn’t fully understand it. My red hair comes from my great-grandmother Esther, who was sent to the gas chambers when she arrived at Auschwitz. My Hebrew middle name is after my grandmother’s beloved sister, Shaindel, who suffered the same fate. Come to think of it, most of my relatives are named after someone who died at the hands of the Nazis—my father was named for his two grandfathers, my mother was named for her two grandmothers, and so on. I carry the weight of their memory and legacy proudly—not as a burden, but as an anchor, connecting me to the struggles and the triumphs of the generations that came before me. There is a quiet power in that.

But, as descendants of Holocaust survivors know, with that anchor also comes the legacy of trauma—the intergenerational kind that trickles down from survivor to child to grandchild. In my family, this manifested itself in a culture of silence and not talking about the hard things. As a result, I had tremendous anxiety about the unknown, but I learned that certain things just weren’t discussed, and I kept my questions and fears—about many things—bottled up for years.

I am very lucky. My remarkable grandma Goldie is currently 103-years-old, and “still having most of her marbles,” as she likes to say. She is tough as nails and speaks her mind without apology. In her younger years, she was an incredible cook (the best latkes ever!) and a talented seamstress, her snow-white hair was always perfectly coiffed, and she was the life of every party. She has taught me a lot about joy, resilience, and the value of family. In the past few years, I have garnered the courage and taken it upon myself to flip the family narrative and be the first to ask her the hard questions—about her childhood, her family, and her experience during and after the Holocaust. The rewards have been boundless.

I learned that when she arrived at Auschwitz, my grandmother and her sister-in-law were sent to the right, while her mother and young niece and nephew were sent to the left, to death. Her sister-in-law ran after the children, and Goldie followed. Miraculously, someone pushed her back to the right, and she was the only one who survived. She described walking through the snow, with only rags on her feet, sick with typhus, on a death march to the Baltic. She and two other women escaped the march and hid in a barn, ultimately being rescued by a Jewish Russian soldier—another miracle. 

During our talks, I also learned so much more about her—in the way that her face softened when she talked about her mother and beloved sister, the light in her eyes when she described her young romance with my grandfather, and the anguish and tears when she talked about the horrors she endured and the people she lost.

Yes, there are pieces missing, and things I will never know, but I’m ok with that now; I’ve worked hard to become comfortable with the not-knowing. I think that makes me appreciate it even more when I uncover something new, and I find more fulfillment in the little bits. Just the other night, I found a letter, typed in German, that my grandmother gave me a few years ago. Within minutes (thanks, ChatGPT), I discovered that this letter was the affidavit my grandfather had written in the early 1960s as part of his application for reparations from the German government. 

In it, he described the multiple labor camps where he was forced to build airfields and sawmills, and his escape from a death march to Mauthausen with four other men. They hid in the forest, and ultimately were saved by an Austrian family who hid them on their farm until the war ended. A Google search revealed that the family was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2011. He described the anguish he felt upon learning that his parents and brothers had been murdered at Auschwitz, and the physical and mental struggles he experienced after the war. It was an incredible, unexpected gift—my first-ever glimpse into what my grandfather had endured—in his own voice—11 years after his death. 

In discovering my grandparents’ stories, I have finally found the connection I sought for so long, and in turn, I have found my own voice. While their trauma will always be a part of me, I have the power to decide which shattered fragments to hold onto as they are, and which pieces to reassemble and do better with. What once felt like obsession has turned into passion, and this has given me a renewed sense of purpose. I remain steadfast in my quest to never stop learning and searching for answers, but also fiercely committed to the responsibility to honor my grandparents’ legacy. By telling their stories—in classrooms and community centers—and teaching others what can happen when hate spirals out of control, I serve as a link in the chain of witness, creating new witnesses so that the chain remains unbroken for future generations.

Over the years, many moments have stayed with us, but one in particular stands out.

A middle school student stood in front of the interactive testimony of Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. He asked her about her life, her family, and her experiences. Then he went quiet and said almost to himself, “She’s like me.”

He didn’t mean their lives were the same. He was recognizing something deeper: connection.

In that moment, the Holocaust was no longer something that happened to “other people, long ago.” Anita was no longer a survivor in a history book. She was a person.

Students today are surrounded by information, yet many still struggle to connect history to real people, human choices, and ultimately themselves. Facts matter deeply. But we began to realize that information alone is often not enough to create lasting understanding.

For more than a decade, we worked alongside educators, researchers, artists, technologists, survivors, psychologists, communities, and, importantly, students, asking a different question:

What if Holocaust education didn’t begin with the Holocaust?

This spring, we launched The Common Circles Experience: New York at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City.

Created through years of research, collaboration, and community engagement, the two-part interactive exhibition weaves together storytelling, art, photography, student participation, and the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony technology to help students engage more deeply with themselves, one another, and ultimately the history and lessons of the Holocaust.

Beginning with Shared Humanity

Part one of The Common Circles Experience begins not with history, but with perception.

Students stand together looking at optical illusions and often see completely different things. One student sees an old woman; another sees a young woman. One sees a vase; another sees two faces.

Almost immediately, the room changes.

Students become curious about what someone else is seeing instead of trying to prove they are right. And then something important happens: they begin recognizing that two people can look at the exact same thing and genuinely experience it differently.

That moment opens the door to larger conversations. How do our experiences shape what we notice, assume, or overlook? What influences the way we see other people? What happens when curiosity replaces immediate judgment?

From there, students encounter portraits and stories from New Yorkers across backgrounds and communities. They begin reflecting not only on how they see others, but on the ways they themselves are often misunderstood, oversimplified, or only partially seen.

And something shifts.

When students recognize complexity within themselves—the parts others may not immediately see or understand—they often become more open to recognizing it in others. We saw this again and again during the development of the exhibit. Students who initially appeared disengaged often became some of the most thoughtful participants once they recognized themselves somewhere within the experience. Curiosity grew. Defensiveness lowered. Conversations deepened.

The process of building the exhibit is itself part of the learning. In many communities, students help photograph teachers and neighbors, conduct interviews, collect stories, and contribute artwork and reflections that become part of the installation.

What surprised us was how deeply this process affected people across the community. Participants often described feeling genuinely seen. Teachers, custodians, security guards, students, and visitors began sharing stories with one another in ways they had not before. The exhibit stopped feeling like something people simply observed and became something they collectively experienced.

From Connection to History

Only after this foundation of connection and reflection is built do students enter the second part of the experience: Voices Against Hate: Lessons from the Holocaust.

There, students engage in lifelike conversations with Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Jewish American liberator Alan Moskin through USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony technology.

And because students arrive having already reflected on perspective, belonging, and shared humanity, the encounter often lands differently.

History is no longer abstract. It becomes personal.

In part one of the experience, students spend time exploring the many layers that shape people’s lives and identities within their own communities. By the time they enter Voices Against Hate, many begin approaching Anita in the same way. Yes, she is a Holocaust survivor. But she is also a cellist, a gardener, a mother, a sister, a friend, a neighbor, and so much more.

Students begin to understand her not as a symbol of history, but as a full human being whose life extends far beyond the Holocaust alone.

You can often see the shift happen in the questions students begin asking. Rather than focusing only on dates or historical facts, many become deeply concerned with Anita as a person. They ask whether she had friends in the camps. Whether she misses her parents. What happened to her sisters. How she survived—not only physically, but emotionally.

Sometimes students reach across time trying to connect Anita’s experiences to questions they are already wrestling with in their own lives.

During one visit in White Plains, a student new to the country asked Anita, “What do you think about Venezuela?”

The question was imperfect but deeply human—an attempt to connect history, displacement, and the present.

What emerges in these moments is not sameness, but empathy.

Students are no longer engaging only with “a Holocaust survivor.” They are responding to another human being’s story with care, curiosity, and emotional investment.

Throughout the experience, students also confront the process of dehumanization itself—how Jews arriving at camps like Auschwitz were stripped of their names, possessions, hair, dignity, and humanity. They see the tattooed number on Anita’s arm.

During one visit, a student asked whether she had ever considered having it removed.

“Why should I?” Anita replied. “It’s not my shame. If I removed my number, I’d join the ranks of Holocaust deniers.”

The room went quiet.

That exchange opened conversations about Holocaust denial and distortion that many students had never fully considered. Students listened to Anita’s responses not as abstract historical lessons, but as testimony from someone they had come to see as real and trustworthy.

These moments matter because students are not simply memorizing facts about dehumanization. They are witnessing the enduring human impact of it.

Understanding Jewish Life + Anti-Semitism

As the exhibit evolved, we also realized that many students lacked even basic exposure to Jewish identity, Jewish diversity, and the long history of anti-Semitism beyond the Holocaust itself.

Too often, students encountered Jews primarily through tragedy, without broader understanding of Jewish life, peoplehood, culture, continuity, and resilience.

That realization led us to expand portions of the experience to more directly explore questions such as:

Who are the Jewish people?
How has anti-Semitism evolved across time?
What does it look like today?
How do stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and dehumanization continue to spread?

Throughout Voices Against Hate, students encounter stories not only of persecution and loss, but also of migration, continuity, resilience, hope, and survival. This matters because it helps students understand that the Jewish people cannot be reduced to a single story.

Too often, students encounter Jews only through stereotypes or the lens of victimhood. By including diverse stories of Jewish life and experience, students begin to recognize Jewish communities as layered, living communities with varied histories, traditions, and identities.

What has been especially meaningful is seeing independent evaluation affirm many of the moments we were witnessing firsthand. Students consistently described the experience as engaging, authentic, interactive, and emotionally meaningful. Evaluators observed students leaning in during testimony sessions, asking thoughtful questions, returning to continue conversations, and remembering stories long after their visits ended. 

Again and again, we watched students move beyond memorizing history into emotionally engaging with individual human stories.

Recently, after visiting the exhibit, a group of fifth graders repeatedly used one word to describe what they felt:

Empathy.

That response mattered deeply to us.

Because empathy does not mean erasing differences or pretending all experiences are the same. It means recognizing another person’s humanity, emotions, and experiences—even when their life may be very different from your own.

Belonging as a Foundation for Learning

One of the most meaningful outcomes was the impact on belonging.

Students frequently described feeling more connected—not only to the material, but to one another and to their broader school communities. Many reported feeling more seen, heard, and understood.

For many Jewish students in particular, the experience was deeply affirming. Seeing Jewish history and identity explored in nuanced and human ways—sometimes through stories connected to their own families—helped many feel more visible and valued.

Learning does not happen in isolation. It happens in relationship.

When students feel connected, they are often more willing to engage with difficult questions, remain in conversation through discomfort, and listen more openly to perspectives different from their own.

Looking Forward

We are living in a moment shaped by headlines, slogans, social media, and algorithms designed to reward outrage, snap judgments, and oversimplification. Complex issues are often reduced to single narratives, and entire groups of people are flattened into categories.

Young people are constantly navigating online spaces that can reinforce division, misinformation, dehumanization, and isolation—often without opportunities to slow down, reflect, or meaningfully engage with perspectives different from their own.

Holocaust education requires the opposite.

It requires reflection, nuance, curiosity, and the ability to hold complexity. It asks students not only to learn what happened, but to consider how and why it happened—and what happens when societies stop seeing people as fully human.

No single approach will reach every student or community. But through this work, several lessons have become clear to us:

Start with connection.
Honor complexity.
Center individual stories.
Create space for reflection.

Because when students begin to see one another as fully human, history no longer feels distant.

It becomes personal.

And when that middle school student quietly said, “She’s like me,” history was not being simplified.

It was becoming human.

I have spent the past few weeks speaking to students about my grandfather’s story of surviving the Holocaust. The truth is that I do not really know his full story. It is something I have struggled with my whole life. That struggle guided me in a way I could not have imagined.

My “3G” story is a bit different because I lived with my grandparents for much of my childhood, and my grandfather was more like a father than a grandfather to me. I’m not exactly sure how old I was when I first started asking him to tell me his story. I was young, probably too young to hear those stories. Still, I had a sense that those stories were vitally important to me and my identity. He never saw it that way. His answer was always the same. “Don’t ask any questions.” 

The older I was the more I begged to know about what had happened to him, and the more I asked the more agitated he became. At some point, my desire for him not to be upset outweighed my need for information. Now that he is gone it’s one of my biggest regrets. As I grew into adulthood, I should have convinced him that I was ready to hear his history. I should have insisted that this was part of my identity too, and I would bear witness to that history and carry it responsibly. If I just knew some of what I don’t know maybe I would be a better advocate for Holocaust education. Perhaps a better speaker that would make more of an impact on those students I speak to. 

This gnawing need that left me with a hole in my persona fueled my research efforts. I began with knowing only my grandfather’s name, birthdate, and the name of his hometown in Poland. It was a starting point, not a great one but a starting point. I initiated my online exploration spending hours on several sites typing in every combination of known facts and variations of the spelling of his name. Emails were sent to anyone I thought could offer the slightest bit of assistance. I waited for responses that took weeks, even months of patiently wishing that I would get some type of response. 

The day that I received an email from Yad Vashem was an amazing day of discovery. Suddenly, I had digital copies of lists of Jews which included his name, his prisoner registration card, and so many documents in a language I could not read. Yet there was no mistaking the one word that connected so many of these documents—Jude. It astounds me how well the Nazis kept records. The sheer number of lists I received is amazing. I spent the better part of the day at my kitchen table looking at the documents and trying to translate them. Suddenly I noticed his signature on one of them. I tried to imagine him signing that simple piece of paper. Such an everyday thing to do, but at that moment I’m sure it felt as if this time signing his name could be a life-or-death moment. My mind often wanders, and I try to envision what my grandfather would have done in the horrendous situations he faced. I have to stop myself knowing that this is undoubtedly what my grandfather wanted to shield me from.

From that first day of uncovering our history something in me changed. All this research started just after COVID lockdown when I had lost my job. My new knowledge made me realize that what I wanted to do was educate. I immediately went to the Holocaust Museum Houston website and requested information about becoming a volunteer. Soon, I found myself interviewing for their docent program. I had no idea how much work would go into completing the docent program. Weeks of classes and practicing. Reading every book and watching every documentary I could and learning how to get through a tour without crying. As my training came to an end it was clear I had found my true calling. Most of my tours are with school groups. Some students have no knowledge of the Holocaust when they visit the museum; some have already had an in-depth lesson. No matter what their level of understanding, my goal is always the same. I aim to give them as much information about the Holocaust and how it happened with a touch of my family history. 

I found myself a part of a community at the museum that I didn’t even know was exactly what I needed in my life. It might sound strange but sometimes that museum feels like home to me. I became involved with the survivor and descendant groups, a board member, joined committees, became an instructor for new docents, and a public speaker. 

People often tell me they are sure my grandfather would be so proud of me. Frankly, he would be very unhappy about it. He would say something like “teach people something else.” Once I was in the museum and was cornered by someone spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric. It was very frightening but somehow, I stayed calm and thankfully we have an amazing security team at the museum. When it was over and I took a few minutes to gather myself I could hear my grandfather telling me that should be the last time I ever set foot in the museum. That is exactly what he would have said; he would have forbidden me from going back. That day I looked up and said, “Sorry but I won’t stop. This is my life’s work now.”

I’m still doing research and searching for more information now incorporating my grandmother. My wish is that I will have the gaps in our story filled in as much as possible. I know that this is something that may not be possible. I want these stories to continue long after I’m gone. We should all aim for these stories to be told for thousands of years. Let these stories remind people what can happen when hate goes unchecked, when democracy fractures, and when humans forget that in essence we are all the same.

Arnie Newfield was born on February 27, 1942, in Westerbork Holland, a transit camp at the time.

His parents were Lisel and Armin Newfield, and he had two older brothers—Bernard (Dutchy) born in July 1934 and Marcel born in June 1938.

His family originally came from Vienna, Austria, where his father was a successful wholesaler supplier. They were comfortable, and his parents were not religious but celebrated Jewish culture. 

In March of 1938, Germany annexed Austria, known as the Anschluss. Not one bullet was fired, and the Nazis were welcomed with open arms.

The night of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, Arnie’s father came home early and was able to hide and missed being arrested. His mother decided it was time to leave and go to Holland.

In January 1939, his father took his older brother Bernard to Holland, and Arnie’s mother followed with Marcel a few months later.

All Jewish refugees were sent to Westerbork—a “collection” camp. When Germany occupied Holland in May 1940, all the foreign Jews were already in one place. 

 His parents had jobs in the camp and were part of the infrastructure, which gave them some level of protection. They also lived together as a family. 

When Arnie was born in February 1942, his family was able to hold a Jewish naming ceremony for him.

Starting in the summer of 1942, deportations began from Westerbork to ghettos and death camps. Arnie’s family was fortunate that they remained until 1944.

 In March 1944, Arnie, his mother, and brothers were sent to Ravenbrück (in Eastern Germany) and his father was sent to Buchenwald.

His parents made a pact that they would meet back in Holland. Not if—when.

In March 1945, his mother and the three boys were sent to Bergen-Belsen, which was the same time that Anne Frank died at Bergen-Belsen.

It was a three-mile march from where the cattle cars left them and the camp. If you did not march, you were shot. Arnie’s mother had to get herself and her three boys to the entrance of the camp. She decided to put Arnie on a truck so she could walk with Bernard and Marcel.

When she arrived at the camp, she found out where Arnie was and demanded him back. The SS woman guard helped her retrieve him all the while yelling and screaming at Arnie’s mother. 

On April 15, 1945, the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. An American soldier who was Arnie’s mother’s half-sister’s (Aunt Edith) husband (Fred) was asking for the Newfeld family and was able to locate them. He was instrumental in helping them get proper care and transport back to Holland. 

They arrived in Holland in September 1945 and soon after Arnie’s father arrived. A beautiful family picture was taken October 19, 1945, that hangs in Arnie’s home now.

They lived with Protestant bookbinders and then received the paperwork to travel to the United States. Arnie was around 5 years old and remembers all his family, especially his only grandfather (Opa) who met the ship. 

His younger brother Billy was born in 1948.

Arnie’s knowledge of his family’s experience comes from his mother. His father never spoke about his experience in Buchenwald, and his brothers also would not speak.

But Arnie speaks about his family’s experiences and is proud of being a survivor.

His message to students and the world:

Be kind. Enjoy life. Live every day to your best. Be the best person you can be.

Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust gave me sensitivities and a way of seeing the world different from that of most American Jews. As the child of Holocaust survivors, I inherited contradictory impulses: fear and defiance, insecurity and pride, grief and resilience. I grew up with pain that engendered anger, though over time that anger slowly eased as the 1970s became the 1980s became the 1990s, and America grew kinder and more hospitable not only to Jews, but to many groups that had once faced prejudice and discrimination.

As I entered adulthood, I built what felt like a normal American life. I became a lawyer, married, bought a home, joined a Reform synagogue, and had children. Slowly, I came to believe that the traumas that shaped my parents belonged to another time and another world. After all, I was living the American dream.

Yet I remained unusually attuned to cultural and political currents, and sometime during the 2010s I began to feel a vague but persistent unease. Then, in 2019, that unease hardened into something more concrete: a fear that the social foundation I had always assumed was secure was beginning to crack. For the first time in my life, I found myself wondering whether the kinds of forces that shattered my parents’ world in 1930s Czechoslovakia could emerge in twenty-first century America.

My life changed profoundly after that realization, and the direction of that change was shaped by the experiences my parents carried out of Europe and passed down to me. 

My parents, who were fluent in English, often spoke their native-tongue Hungarian, which they never taught me. I resented that because much was said around me that I could not understand. My mom said it was because they wanted me to be fully Americanized. This was true, but not the whole truth. Hungarian also functioned as a shield behind which painful memories and tragedies could be concealed. Yet the concealment itself created in me a dark and persistent sense of loss.

Sometimes my parents discussed things in hushed tones tinged with anxiety. Other times Hungarian-speaking ladies, approximately my mom’s age, came to visit. They would fawn over me, grip my face on both sides with their lotioned hands, and tell me in Hungarian what a sweet little darling I am. They gave me anxiety.

We usually had relatives over for Passover, that most American of Jewish holidays. I can still picture my mother sitting at the head of the dining room table nearest the kitchen, speaking normally about something mundane. Then suddenly a thought would enter her mind—or she would mention her parents or her younger brother Marci (Martin in English)—and she would burst into sobbing for a few shocking seconds, provoking in me some mixture of embarrassment, pity, and horror. The table would grow silent. A few moments later she would compose herself and resume the conversation. I would tell myself silently: just pretend that didn’t happen.

Unlike my mother, my father rarely spoke about the Holocaust or the war. He mostly kept those things sealed inside himself, though he sometimes spoke in idyllic terms about his childhood. He was the youngest of four children: his middle brother was John, after whom I was named; his older brother Alex; and his sister Ann. He spoke of riding horses and skiing in the Carpathian Mountains, of his closeness to John, who could “fix anything” and dreamed of becoming an engineer, and of his father, who owned a successful moving business with his brother Julius, who lived next door.

That world was destroyed after Hungary annexed the region and aligned itself with Nazi Germany. The Jews of Ungvár were driven into forced labor battalions and ghettos, and ultimately deported to Auschwitz and other death camps. The most I ever heard about John was that he died somewhere in “Rush-ee-uh.” Ann was murdered along with her husband and child. Alex, who had become a banker, was sent to a labor camp. His wife and child were murdered, I believe in Auschwitz. I absorbed these fragments as a child because asking too many questions seemed too painful for everyone involved.

I have often wondered whether my father’s stoic silence and refusal to grieve contributed to the heart attack he suffered when I was eleven years old. He survived and recovered enough to continue supporting us, though not enough to ease the additional anxiety this placed on my mother. As for me, that was the end of bowling and McDonald’s on Saturday mornings.

Despite my father’s reluctance to talk about the war, I gradually learned fragments of his story from my mother. Only much later, through adult conversations and historical research, did those fragments begin assembling themselves into something resembling a coherent narrative.

Somehow Alex escaped death. Forced into a Hungarian Jewish labor battalion and reportedly condemned to death for attempting to flee and join the partisans, he escaped before the sentence could be carried out and eventually reached Soviet-controlled territory. There he joined the First Czechoslovak Army Corps and became involved in reconnaissance and partisan operations behind German lines during the final years of the war. Only recently did I discover military history references substantially confirming these stories, identifying my uncle as Capt. Alexander Kováč, connected to special reconnaissance and parachute units operating during the Slovak National Uprising.

According to the family stories handed down to me, my father also escaped from a forced labor camp but was captured by “the Russians” and jailed. Somehow Alex found him there, secured his release, and brought him into the anti-Nazi partisan forces. For years these stories sounded almost unbelievable to me, suspended somewhere between family legend and history.

What I eventually pieced together was that after the Allied victory, Alex was placed in charge of a district that included Komárom, my mother’s hometown, and my father served there with him. Their duties included de-Nazification—interrogating suspected collaborators and turning captured Nazis over to Soviet authorities. It was amid this devastated postwar landscape that my father met my mother. She had survived Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and forced labor at a Siemens factory in Bavaria, where Hungarian Jewish women were worked long shifts in support of the Nazi war machine.

As I grew older and occasionally became able to speak with my mother about the war, she told me how she survived by staying close to her friends Kathy and Rita. They shared food and cared for whichever one of them was sickest or nearest to despair. My mother saw Marci a few times in Auschwitz. Once he managed to give her food. After the war, when she returned to Komárom, she was told that Marci had been seen alive during the liberation of Auschwitz. She waited for him to come home, and waited. He never returned, and she never learned what became of him.

Like many concentration camp survivors, my mother was determined to marry and have children, both to rebuild a shattered life and to deny Hitler a posthumous victory over the Jewish people. It was in this atmosphere that she met my father, whom she later described to me as “a tall, handsome man on a white horse.” Together, my father and Alex helped protect my mother and her friends from predatory Soviet soldiers who roamed the region in the chaotic aftermath of the war. They also brought to justice a former friend and neighbor who, before the deportations, had agreed to hide jewelry from my grandfather’s modest jewelry shop but instead stole it for herself.

Under the postwar Czech government, my father was placed in charge of a factory in the Sudetenland, from which the German population—most of whom had supported Hitler—was being expelled. During this period, my father became disillusioned with communism. Unlike Alex, who had become an influential government official, my father saw where the new regime was headed. In this he had an ally in his cousin and best friend James Kovac, Julius’ son. Growing up, I knew him simply as “Uncle Jimmy.”

I had many “uncles” as a child, even though my only actual uncle was Alex. So little family remained that more distant relatives—and even close family friends—were folded into the category of family itself. I also had a “grandfather,” Emil Moskowitz, the father of my father’s first cousin Harry, whom I knew as “Uncle Harry.” Emil and his wife Hanna sponsored my parents when they emigrated to the United States in 1946.

We visited “Grandma and Grandpa” in their Passaic apartment on Saturday afternoons. Grandpa often greeted me at the door with a Cadbury chocolate bar or a shiny silver half-dollar. A deeply religious man, he kept a reel-to-reel recorder in his bedroom with a microphone through which, he confided to me, he would “talk to God.” 

I remember reading a newspaper article about one of “Grandma and Grandpa’s” major wedding anniversary celebrations shortly after I had learned to read. Imagine my surprise when I was not listed among the grandchildren. No explanation made sense to me. Not until well into my teens did I fully understand that an uncle is the sibling of a parent, and a grandparent the parent of a parent. Only then did I begin to grasp that the loss was not only my parents’ loss, but mine as well.

Uncle Alex reacted strongly to my father’s decision to emigrate to the United States. On the eve of my parents’ departure, he reportedly instructed my father to “tell Truman to go to hell.” At the time, Alex remained deeply committed to the postwar communist project in Czechoslovakia. In later years, however, Alex came to believe that my father had made the right decision and that the true villain was Stalin rather than Truman.

In time, Alex himself fell victim to the Stalinist system he had served. Like many Eastern European patriots and anti-fascist fighters who had allied themselves with Soviet power during the war, he eventually became politically suspect under the paranoid and repressive atmosphere of postwar communism. The anti-Semitic atmosphere surrounding the Slánský trials and related purges in Czechoslovakia shattered the faith many Jewish communists had once placed in the Soviet system and left deep scars on those who had believed they were helping to build a more just world.

In the early 1950s, Alex was sentenced to prison, where he served approximately five years before being released and, in my father’s words, “retired.” Before his downfall, he remarried without disclosing his Jewish background and had three children. One was named Leslie after my father. Another, Eva, studied architecture, and while still a university student witnessed Soviet tanks crush the hopes of the Prague Spring in 1968.

My mother, who desperately wanted children, was unable to conceive for many years after the war, which led her into profound depression. I was told that in 1958 she suffered what was then called a “nervous breakdown” and attempted suicide by “sticking my head in the oven.” She was hospitalized in what my family referred to as “a sanitarium” for approximately six months. I later learned that Uncle Harry had given my father the money to pay for her treatment.

After leaving the hospital, my mother underwent therapy for many years. I was born on New Year’s Eve 1961, roughly a year after my parents moved from Passaic, where they had been renting, to suburban Nutley, where they purchased the house in which I grew up. My mother later told me that she had finally “learned to relax,” allowing her to become pregnant. I was an only child. Throughout my life my mother would often tell me, “You are my everything.”

In the summer of 1978, when I was sixteen, I traveled with my father to Budapest and Lake Balaton in Hungary to vacation with Alex, his wife, and my three cousins. Uncle Jimmy came as well with his daughter Karen. Uncle Alex and I played chess in the grass overlooking the lake. He spoke little English, but whenever I was close to winning he would smile, shrug his shoulders, and say, “No Army.” By this he meant that after losing too many pieces—the queen, rooks, bishops, knights, pawns—he was powerless and defenseless.

At the time, I was curious about communism. One evening we went to a nearby Cuban restaurant and waited what felt like hours for service while employees visibly lingered about doing almost nothing. I ordered “veal à la Castro” largely because Castro himself interested me. That night I became violently ill and remained sick for much of the trip.

Only later did I come to understand that there had been a larger purpose behind the visit. My father, Uncle Jimmy, and Uncle Alex were quietly planning for Eva to defect to the United States.

In 1980, Eva was granted permission to visit us in the United States for one month. Before she left, Uncle Alex reportedly warned her that she might discover her relatives in America were Jewish. She didn’t know.

When Eva failed to return, the Czech government realized she had defected and sentenced her to prison in absentia. My father hired a lawyer, secured the conviction papers, and used them to demonstrate that Eva would face political persecution if forced to return to Czechoslovakia. That is how my cousin eventually received political asylum and became an American citizen.

Eva lived with us for approximately a year, during which time she learned English while my father worked to secure the documents that would allow her to seek employment. One afternoon, while my father was at work, Eva, my mother, and I sat together in my parents’ bedroom going through old family photo albums. Suddenly Eva came upon a photograph of her father, Uncle Alex, together with his first wife and child. She stared at it in shock and confusion, unable to understand why her father appeared with another family she had never seen before. My mother then had to explain the terrible truth to her.

I had never seen the photograph before and was almost as shocked as Eva. Perhaps I had heard at some earlier point that Uncle Alex once had another wife and child who were murdered during the Holocaust before he married Eva’s mother, but I had long since buried the thought. I remember sitting there silently while Eva and my mother spoke, trying to imagine the psychological shock Eva must have been experiencing. To the best of my recollection, she and I never discussed the moment afterward. I would not even have known how to begin.

Eventually, I got on with my life. I moved west across the country to attend law school in California, then east again to Brooklyn for my first job as a lawyer with the District Attorney’s Office, where, for the first time in my life, being Jewish did not feel unusual. There I met other children of Holocaust survivors, with whom I immediately felt a special bond.

After three years, I returned to California, where I worked for five years as a litigator at a small law firm. Eventually, feeling restless with the practice of law, I attended UCLA and UC Irvine for a year to prepare for admission into a Ph.D. program in English literature. This additional study was necessary because my undergraduate background had been in political science and history.

I had always been drawn to politics because somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt a need to remain alert to political and historical currents so that if the danger of anti-Semitism were to return, I could recognize it in time to protect myself and my family. To my surprise, I discovered that the study of literature increasingly resembled political theory. This was intellectually exciting but also faintly unsettling. The emerging intellectual currents—postmodernism, postcolonialism, and identity politics—struck me as potentially dangerous for Jews, though when I raised these concerns with a Jewish professor, he assured me there was nothing to worry about.

I was later admitted to Rutgers on fellowship, an outcome that proved fortunate because I sensed—correctly, as it turned out—that my father did not have much time left to live. My father passed away on Independence Day 2001, just two months before September 11. I have often felt relieved that he did not live to witness that day or the world that followed it. By then I had left graduate school and started my own law practice, and my wife and I had our first child.

My mother passed away in 2018 at the age of ninety-four. I have often felt relieved that, like my father before her, she did not live to witness the resurgence of anti-Semitism and fear that would emerge so soon afterward.

Around the time of my mother’s death, I happened upon Douglas Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe. At the same time, I was following Jeremy Corbyn’s rise within the British Labour Party and the prevalence of anti-Semitism there. Although Murray’s book focused primarily on immigration and cultural change rather than anti-Semitism itself, the juxtaposition of these developments caused me to worry not only about the future of Jews in Europe, but increasingly about what could happen in the United States.

Then, in 2019, I saw something taking shape in my hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey when anti-Zionist activists successfully organized and staged a reading of the propaganda book P is for Palestine for young children at our public library. As I began looking into the event, I realized that this was not spontaneous local activism, but part of a sophisticated, organized, and well-funded movement. I was particularly struck by a petition supporting the reading that was backed by Samidoun, which I quickly learned was a front organization for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

At that moment, something crystallized for me. I understood that my life would henceforth be different, and that the history of my family and my people—as handed down to me through my parents—required me to oppose what I was seeing. I joined with other Jews in my town to resist these forces and have remained active in opposing the scourge of anti-Zionism ever since.

John Woolf was born Julius Wolf on October 31, 1928, in Carei, Romania.

He was raised in Buštino, Czechoslovakia, which became Hungary in 1939. John’s father, Herman, owned and operated a flour mill and electrical generating plant, employing more than 100 residents of their town. John and his family had a happy life in Buštino, surrounded by extended family and spending vacations in Carei with John’s mother’s family.

In 1939, everything changed when the Hungarians came to occupy the region of Carpatho-Ruthenia, which included the town of Buštino. Restrictions on Jewish life began to take hold, and eventually Herman had to give up his business.

In May of 1944, the Jewish residents of Buštino were forced from their homes and required to move into the Mateszalkaghetto in Hungary.

Conditions in the ghetto were horrific, and John and his family were forced to sleep in the local cemetery until they could find housing in an attic in one of the ghetto buildings. The attic was terribly hot, and there was not even enough room to stand up.

In June of 1944, John and his family were forced onto a cattle car and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, a camp prisoner advised him to lie to the SS guards and tell them he was 18 years old, rather than his real age of 15. John and his father were both selected for hard labor, and separated from John’s mother, Kato. Kato was later sent to endure slave labor at Stutthof Concentration Camp. 

John and his father stayed together throughout their time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but were separated in January of 1945 as the Soviets approached. They were both sent on a death march to Gleiwitz, and then placed on trains to Oranienburg, Germany, during which they were separated. Herman later admitted to John that he purposely left him to increase John’s odds of surviving. Miraculously, they both survived and were reunited with Kato after being liberated by the American army in March of 1945.

Most of John’s extended family was murdered in various concentration camps, but John and his parents were eventually able to come to New York to join his uncle who had been living in America since 1939. They arrived in the United States on August 5, 1946.

John knew no English upon coming to the U.S., but his determination and grit helped him achieve at school and eventually become an electrical engineer, traveling all over the world to work on electronic systems in tanks and aircrafts. John’s travels even took him to Germany, where he learned that not all Germans hate Jews, and he even developed a few German friends.

Today, John lives in Massapequa, New York, and participates in Holocaust education programs such as the UJA’s Witness Project. He feels that sharing his experiences with future generations will inspire them to create a more positive and less prejudiced world.

Renée Silver was born in 1931 in the region of Alsace-Lorraine known as the Saarland.

This territory had gone back and forth throughout history being occupied by France and Germany. Renée spoke both German and French fluently, and her father fought for the Kaiser during the First World War.

In 1935, Hitler visited Saarland because of a plebiscite vote to determine if it would stay independent or become part of Germany or France.

Renée’s maid took her to the Nazi parade where an SS officer put Renée on his shoulders so she could see Hitler passing by in an open car as part of the motorcade. Ninety percent of the population voted to be part of Germany in 1935.

The family moved further into France to Alsace Saar Gamein (mainly Christian), where Renée went to school. After Kristallnacht in 1938, two cousins and her grandmother came to live with them as well.

In 1939, the Second World War broke out and many of their neighbors saw them as potential German spies since her father and grandmother were considered German.

The family was arrested and put in jail for seven days. Then they were deported to Gurs, a camp built in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Renée was nine years old and her younger sister was seven.

The conditions at the camp were horrendous—full of mud, bed bugs, fleas, rats, lice, and little food.

Her father, who suffered paralysis on his left side due to a war injury, was hospitalized. In June of 1940, Northern France was under German occupation; they were released and returned home. Many laws against Jews were enforced making life extremely difficult. 

On Renée’s last day of school in June of 1942, Renée was supposed to be presented with a scholarship to an esteemed secondary school. The principal announced in front of the entire school that she could not give the award to Renée because she is Jewish and the award was then given to another student.

Then the roundup of Jews began, and the family decided to leave for the Vichy controlled part of France in Toulouse and then Leon. Renée and her sister were separated from her parents and placed in hiding in a small village called Le Chambon. They were given false papers and new Catholic identities. 

The citizens of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon under the direction of Pastor Andre Trocme risked their lives to rescue and hide Jews, especially children. In addition to providing shelter, the citizens of the town obtained forged identification and ration cards for Jews to use. It was estimated that the people of the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon had saved between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews from certain death.

Renée and her family were smuggled into Switzerland, a trip of 187 miles. They remained there till after the war and were able to emigrate to the United States in 1947. Today, Renée is 95-years-old.

My name is Kristine Keren (née Krystyna Chiger), and I’m a Survivor. I was born on October 28, 1935, in Lwów, Poland.

My father heard that the Lwów ghetto would be liquidated at midnight, so we hid in the cellar, located in a barracks. We used to go there almost every afternoon after my mother returned from work, and we stayed hidden there because we expected a big action from the Nazis. 

At that time, I was seven years old and Pawełek, my brother, was three. We left the cellar and headed toward the Poltva River. Finally, we reached the sewer. It was very dark and wet; when I went in, I felt terribly scared, and I was trembling with fear. I stayed calm, but I kept asking my father how far our destination was. 

In that sewer lay many stones with yellow worms crawling upon them. We put all our belongings on the stones and sat on them. Water was dripping down the walls, and there was such a stink in the air that we could hardly bear it. I saw big, ginger rats that ran past us like hens. 

I eventually got used to it; Pawełek was not afraid at all. For five full weeks, day and night, I lay on Mum’s lap and Pawełek on Dad’s lap. We could neither move nor get up. There were 20 other people there. From the very beginning, Polish sewage workers brought us black bread and margarine every day. They were afraid of being noticed, so they entered the sewer from various places through manhole covers that they opened. I remember their names: Leopold Socha, Stefan Wróblewski, and Jerzy Kowalów. In the sewer, we had a carbide lamp. It was hanging on a hook fixed between stones, and it was on all the time. The Poles brought us carbide for it. Dad used to bring us water in a jug, which he carried in his teeth as he had to walk bent over. I felt unhappy there. I wasn’t allowed to speak loudly. I could only whisper in Mum’s ear.

I dreamed that the war was over so I could go out into the world. I missed the sun, the air, and the flowers the most. Once I asked our friend to bring me some field flowers. I wanted to see a dog and a horse very much, whereas Pawełek missed birds the most. But I didn’t tell Mum about it because she had a lot of other worries.

It was summer. When it was raining, water flowed into the sewer; when toilets were flushed, the sewer was full of water, and we had to lean tight against the stones just near the wall in order not to get poured on. Pawełek was very little at that time. He was just three years old, and he cried quite often. Mum was very nervous then as she was afraid that somebody would hear him, and we would be found. On one occasion, one of the men who stayed in the sewer with us was so angry with Pawełek that he threatened him with a gun. It didn’t help as Pawełek started crying even louder.

After five weeks, other sewage workers went into the sewer to clean it, and they stumbled upon us. We turned off the light, but one man lit a cigarette lighter, and they noticed us. We had to run away. We ran along the main sewer, not knowing the direction. Suddenly, we saw “our” sewage workers who had food for us. They were very surprised and asked us where we were going. Daddy explained what had happened. They led us to a side sewer and ordered us to stay there overnight. They also promised us that they would find us a new shelter the next day.

In the morning, they came back, and they led us along the Poltva River through the main sewer. The walk lasted almost half a day. Yet I felt much better then. I could walk, I didn’t have to sit anymore. I don’t know why, but the whole burden seemed to have fallen from my heart; I felt so happy that I whistled with joy. The way was very difficult. We stepped on various pipes and holes. I was barefoot, in a summer dress, and trembled with cold, yet I was cheerful. A pin got stuck in my leg, but I removed it myself as I didn’t want to disturb Mum.

Finally, we reached a concrete pipe. It was so narrow that we had to crawl on all fours into it. The cold was unbearable, and we had no place to sleep. The next day our friends ordered us to get out, and we resumed our march. We removed a plank and went into another pipe. There were 11 of us. The rest died because they left the sewer. Kuba Leinwald, my uncle, drowned in the Poltva River. He went out to get some water during the storm and was taken by the flow.

In the new sewer, we felt much better; we had more room. We slept on bunks built by Dad from planks that he found in the sewer. There were four such bunks. I slept with Dad and another man. I felt squeezed like a herring in a barrel. It was very uncomfortable. Mum slept with Paweł and another woman. We had one carbide lamp, which was on day and night. 

Rats would try to eat our bread, but Daddy would threaten them with a stick and they would run away. But Pawełek would feed the rats like hens. He would throw them breadcrumbs and boiled potatoes. They would come up close to us and squeak, but he wasn’t afraid at all. 

We had a couple of bowls and a Primus stove brought by our good sewer workers. One of the women would cook soup and coffee and Mum would divide it among us, so I wasn’t hungry. One old, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered lady fell ill and died. Another woman gave birth to a child, but it died and was thrown into the Poltva River. Two young ladies were on duty by turns and kept an eye on maintaining clean conditions. The lamp was on all the time, and I didn’t know day from night, but I felt that day was marked by the visits of our sewage workers. 

When it was raining, water dripped into our shelter by a pipe through which we could barely see grating and a little light. Sometimes I noticed a sunray, but a very faint one. Once I went into that pipe to look at the world, but I didn’t see anything. I could only feel a faint breath of fresh air. I can’t even express how much I missed the sun and the fresh air. I heard cars moving above our heads, I heard people’s voices and the laughter of children playing, and I often thought that I would have been very happy if I had been able to play like them. Once I heard a child crying and telling its mother that it wanted to sleep.  

I fell very ill with measles, Mum later told me, and Pawełek caught the illness from me and then had a hoarse throat. One of the sewage workers brought eggs for him. He had to carry them in his teeth, wrapped in a handkerchief because he had a bag with food in his hands, and he had to crawl on all fours to get to our shelter.

On one occasion, a Primus stove caught fire. We were all terrified. We threw rags on it, but they started to burn as well, so we extinguished the fire with burnt-out carbide. I was very scared, but Paweł was even more terrified; he ran to the furthest bunk and hid himself there. After smothering the fire, we were all charred, and we looked like ghosts. On another occasion, the next summer, we were flooded. After a great storm, heavy rain started to pour into our shelter. Our friends took shovels and started pushing water into the pipe to divert the flow and save our shelter. Fortunately, they succeeded.

We spent 14 months there. Our sewage workers helped us all the time. When we ran out of money, they brought us food for free. 

At the end of our stay in the sewers, I heard sirens whistling and cannons booming. Although I knew that the Russians, our liberators, were coming, I felt very scared. Finally, one day we heard loud knocking at the grating. It was our sewage workers, who gave us a sign that we were free.

We walked for a couple of minutes along one sewer, then we got into another pipe, full of spider webs. Then we removed the lid and finally, our workers got us out.

We looked so miserable that we didn’t even resemble children. People took pity on us. One woman bought us gooseberries. When I saw the sun, people, and flowers, I was overjoyed. I felt very, very happy. But Pawełek was crying, and he wanted to return to the sewer as he wasn’t used to light, and he was afraid of people.

Born in Łódź, Poland, my grandmother Eva Moskovitz grew up in a large and loving family. Before the war, there were fifteen members of her immediate family. By the end of the Holocaust, only a handful of siblings remained. During their imprisonment in Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen, they witnessed unimaginable suffering. My great-grandmother held one of her daughters as she died during transport to Auschwitz.

Throughout the war, my grandmother and her siblings did everything they could to remain together. They even changed their birthdays in the hope that the Nazis would classify them in the same age group. They understood that there was strength in numbers.

My great-aunt Genya stayed with my grandmother Eva throughout the war. In April of 1945, just days before liberation, my grandmother was gravely ill with typhoid and close to death. Her body had been weakened by years of starvation and forced labor. Refusing to give up on her sister, Genya risked her life by crossing a road under guard to search for food. She found several decaying potatoes and brought them back to Eva. Our family believes those half-rotten potatoes helped keep my grandmother alive until she received medical treatment after liberation.

I often think about what Genya must have felt in that moment. After years of hunger, she could easily have kept the potatoes for herself. Instead, she chose her sister’s life over her own immediate needs. Her courage, compassion, and fierce loyalty continue to inspire me.

One of Judaism’s central values is chesed, or loving kindness. True chesed is more than a thoughtful gesture or charitable donation. It is the willingness to show up for another person, even in the darkest moments. By refusing to abandon her sister, Genya preserved my grandmother’s dignity and, in doing so, affirmed her own.

My memories of my grandmother Eva are limited. She died when I was in first grade after years of suffering from post-traumatic stress, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Although I knew her only briefly, her story has remained central to my identity. I am deeply grateful to my cousin Sally, Genya’s daughter, for preserving these family memories and sharing them with me.

As a third-generation survivor, I carry not only the trauma of my family’s past, but also the values that sustained them: loyalty, resilience, and loving kindness. When I think about my grandmother and Aunt Genya, I am reminded that survival was not only about enduring suffering. It was about choosing to care for one another, even when doing so required extraordinary sacrifice.

My family, my father, my mother, and my sister Rachel who was 10 years older than I, we were a very lucky family. We survived the war.

My parents were born in Warsaw, Poland, and lived in very religious homes. My mother, the second youngest child of nine children, went to Polish school and learned how to play the piano. They were comfortable. But my father, the youngest of three children, lived in extreme poverty, having lost his father when he was three; he started to work when he was 12-years-old. He learned a trade which sustained him all his life. He made ladies handbags. He became a craftsman, an artisan.

At 18, he became secular and the joined the Jewish Socialist Party, called the Bund, and fought all his life for better conditions for workers. After World War I, he went to Belgium and met my mother. They were married in Brussels on January 6, 1922, and Rachel was born a year later.

My father tried a few times to come to America, but to no avail. In 1926, they moved to Paris where they joined the Bund, and Rachel went to Yiddish school.

I was born in 1932, and, at that time, the law was if your parents were foreigners, you had to be naturalized. So, at age of one, I was naturalized and became a French citizen, the first in my family.

My father also joined the French Socialist Party and with political connections was able to obtain French citizenship for his family. So, in 1938, my parents and Rachel became French citizens. In France before the war, Jews from Poland did not receive French citizenship.

I had a very pleasant early childhood. I went to kindergarten where they showed us Charlie Chaplin movies. We called him Charlot.

September 1, 1939, everything changed. The Germans invaded Poland; France and England declared ware against Germany. They then invaded Holland, and on May 10, 1940, Belgium fell and they started to march through France.

Panic. My father said: “Where the Germans are I do not want to be. So let’s leave.”

On June 11, 1940, three days before they marched through Paris we fled to a small village in the center of France in the Massif Central mountains, similar to the Catskills.

My parents rented a small room above a watchmaker’s shop. The next morning I woke up and saw my father in front of the mirror saying: “I am all gray.” He became gray overnight. He had beautiful black hair the day before.

A week later the town crier went around beating his drum and called everyone to the village square, where the mayor announced in tears that France had signed an armistice with Germany; our country had lost the war.

I asked my father, what does armistice mean? He explained to me that it was the end of the war, but we Jews were in danger because of a very bad man called Hitler.

France was divided in two parts: the occupied zone from the north to the center of France, Paris included, and the rest of the country became the Free Zone ruled by the Vichy government.

We were lucky to be in the Free Zone area so we went to Lyon, the second largest city in France. We rented an apartment outside of Lyon. My father worked in the apartment; Rachel went to work for a big French company; I went to school; and my mother had the hard task of trying to feed us. The winter of 1940 and 1941 was very harsh, and the Germans took everything—food, fuel, etc. It was hard. Other Bundists came to Lyon so they formed a resistance network.

Being French citizens, my family was at an advantage, and they used that advantage to help other Jews. Rachel, 18 at the time, became their courier. My father made her a pocketbook with a false bottom to store false identity papers inside. Rachel, as part of her position in the network, would travel by bus or train and deliver false papers to Jews in hiding. She would help families memorize their new identity, speak to them in Yiddish if they did not speak French, and sometimes travel with them to the Spanish or Swiss border.

In 1941, Suzanne Buisson, who had been in the high echelons of the French Socialist Party, came to see my father and asked him: “Will you help us?” My father said yes. So she gave him pamphlets to distribute and paste on the walls in Lyon. He then became the liaison between the two resistance networks. Suzanne was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and deported. In the Montmartre section of Paris there is a Square called Suzanne Buisson, Resistante.

We had people staying in our apartment from time to time. A couple from Belgium stayed with us almost six months. They never went out. My mother risked her life to provide food for everyone. She was Mother Courage.

France had the highest rate of Jewish survivors of all the countries in Europe. I think it is due to having a free zone for more than two years. Jews with visas could sail out of France, and families with enough cash could hide in little villages and blend with the scenery.

My parents had friends who were hiding in a very small village, and they mailed us a rabbit. My mother declared to us: it is a chicken. We did not argue with her. We were so happy to eat meat.

We had a radio and listened to the BBC every night to hear real news. One night, Churchill spoke to us in perfect French and told us: “We shall not forget you.” It was so uplifting. Churchill was a great man.

In November 1942, the American army landed in North Africa, and the Germans occupied Lyon. We lost our naturalization and became foreign Jews so we fled to Grenoble in the Alps, which was occupied by the Italian army who did not bother Jews.

In Grenoble as in Lyon my father worked in the apartment we rented; Rachel worked in an office; I went to school; and my mother would pass checkpoints and go to farms outside of Grenoble and bring us good food. The resistance became more intense, and life became more dangerous.

One time, Rachel had to go to a very important meeting run by the network. She got sick and could not go so my mother went in her place. It was very risky but she went anyway.

In the fall of 1943, the Germans occupied Grenoble and all of France: we were trapped. In the middle of the night, we were awakened by endless ringing of the bell, knocking on the door. The French police were looking for Italian deserters, since we lived in an Italian neighborhood.

Of course we did not know that; we thought they were looking for Jews. My father decided not to open the door. The police were ready to force the door down, but luckily our neighbors told them there are old people living here who are never home. The police left but I was shaking for the rest of the night. Our neighbors saved our lives but we were no longer safe.

I was sent to a Catholic boarding school in the mountains where I went to mass every Sunday, skied, and pretended to be happy. But in early 1944 Jewish children were arrested by the Gestapo in a nearby convent so my parents decided to send me to Switzerland. A group of parents, most of them Buddhist, hired a passeur, a smuggler, and I joined a group of ten children and took the train from Grenoble to Annemasse, a border town. 

Along with us were a married couple. The wife was very pregnant, and she began having labor pains in the train. On our arrival to the town, the smuggler told use to wait for him at the train station, and he took the couple to a hotel. He came back and took us to a field behind the buses, telling us to lie still and wait for his return.

It was very cold and getting dark, and in front of us was a road with German tanks and big trucks passing by. The oldest among us was 18 years old. He had a thermos with hot coffee and crawled from child to child giving us a sip. I will never forget him.

Meanwhile, at the hotel the smuggler had been arrested and gave away our location to the French police, who took us into custody. The officer at the station was given carte blanche by his superior, that is do what you want, so instead of delivering us to the Germans they took us to a boarding school at the border. From there, the lady principal and her assistant risked their lives by sneaking us to the French/Swiss border, and we climbed a barbed wire fence to safety.

Because I climbed that barbed wire fence I have grandchildren today.

In Switzerland we were arrested by the authorities because we were illegal aliens. We were taken to an internment camp called Le Camp du Bout du Monde—the camp of the end of the world. We were not treated well, slept on wooden floors, and were not well fed. I was hungry all the time. But they saved our lives. 

I then was placed in a foster home in Basel, then in a convent, then to another foster home in a tiny village near the late of Thun. I was very unhappy and very worried about my parents and Rachel.

During the war, names like Rachel, Sarah, David, or Jacob were death sentences. So Rachel became Raymonde officially and to all her friends. The American army liberated Grenoble on my birthday, August 22, 1944. On that day, a friend of the family came to the street where they lived and in front of their window shouted with all of her strength: Rachel. They were free.

In March 1945 I came back to Grenoble and was reunited with my family. A month later we returned to Paris. We had survived.

Three hundred years ago, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:

A startling and unique spectacle to see a people expatriated, having no land for over two thousand years, a people damaged, blamed, mixed with strangers for even a longer time, rejected, a people dispersed throughout the world, a people persecuted, despised by all nations, still conserving their customs, their laws, their traditions.

Athens, Sparta, Rome perished an left no children on earth. Zion destroyed, did not lose their children. They saved them, they multiplied, extending throughout the world. And they always recognize each other, they mix with all people but never conform, they have no chief but are always a people, they have no country but are always citizens.

We Jews will survive, no matter what happens.

I was born in 1933 in Rexingen, Germany. I had an older sister named Inga who was born in 1930.

We lived with our parents Jacob and Meta Levi but eventually we moved in with my maternal grandmother Oma Betty. We were fortunate children surrounded by loving grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Little did we suspect the horrors that would befall members of our family. 

I clearly remember Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. I was five-years-old, but the trauma of that night is still clear in my mind. The German soldiers came to our house looking for Jewish men and my father hid in the horse feeding trough. Soon after that, my father had to work for the Germans, giving up his own cattle business. There was daily fear and constant worry. I recall that when the German soldiers would parade and goose step through the town, our parents held us tightly.

On a warm day in early July of 1939, I remember boarding a train with my sister and with my mother. I was bundled up in multiple layers of clothing including a winter coat. We arrived at a port where my mother put us on a boat, and we said our goodbyes. It must have been torture for my mother to do that not knowing when or if we would be reunited and who was going to take care of us. We were six- and nine-years-old respectively. Today this is known as the Kindertransport.

We arrived in England on July 7, 1939, but my memories of this time were very dim. We took the train to London and then to Manchester, where we were to live with Willie and Ray Shalyt. Willie was a Russian Jewish immigrant who owned a successful linen business.

The Shalyts had two daughters, Celia and Pauline. We lived better than we did in Germany with this family. In September, Inge and I started school and learned the language quickly. Our new peaceful life with the Shalyts was interrupted by World War II and the German bombing of England. One day in the fall of 1939, Willie took us to school with suitcases. All the children in town were being evacuated to the countryside for safety from the German bombings. We boarded the train and headed for Fleetwood, a small fishing village. I remember standing in the town hall, while the townspeople selected their new charges. Into our lives came Maude and Muriel Bailey. We were well taken care of by kindly Anglican ladies, who even helped us keep our Jewish identity. A rabbi came to town every few weeks to help us celebrate Jewish festivals so we would not forget our religious customs. On school holidays, we returned to Manchester to stay with the Shalyts. One Passover, American soldiers came to our house for a Passover seder. One of the soldiers was from New York. He wrote to his wife about us, and she, in turn, got in touch with our parents, who escaped Germany and made their way to the United States. At some point in 1940, Willie took us to London so we could get American passports for our eventual immigration to the United States. We experienced our first real encounter with the terror of war. After leaving the American embassy, air raid sirens went off and we ran to Victoria Station to catch our train. Searchlights streaked the sky and guns were blasting away. We rushed onto the train and arrived in Manchester safely but with the sound of sirens still ringing in our ears.

In the summer of 1944, Inge and I left Fleetwood, and went to live in a hostel in Blackpool with other German Jewish refugees. Most of the girls had no knowledge of the whereabouts of their parents and they were very jealous of Inge and myself. This jealousy flared up every time we received a letter or package from our parents.

We went to Fleetwood quite often to visit Maude and Muriel Bailey. Just before the Christmas holiday in 1944, we packed up all our belongings and went back to Manchester. We were told that we would be leaving for the United States. Weeks passed and nothing happened. Finally in February of 1945, we went to Liverpool to board a Danish cargo ship called the MS Eria. The ship carried about 50 passengers, mostly German Jews. Being young, we did not recognize the multiple dangers of crossing the Atlantic in wartime because of the German U-boats. The second hazard was the stormy Atlantic weather. On the first night aboard the ship, we went to the dining room and enjoyed one of the most lavish buffets we had ever seen in our lives. After five years of living on rations, we were overjoyed and ate as much as we possibly could. The next morning, as we left Liverpool, I immediately became seasick and stayed that way until we docked in the United States.

By the time we were reunited with our parents, it had been more than six years since we had seen them. Tears came to my eyes when we arrived at Pennsylvania Station in February of 1945. At first, I did not recognize my father, but my mother looked the same.

We took the noisy subway to Washington Heights where many German Jews who recently arrived had settled. My parents lived in a dilapidated apartment building, in a sparsely furnished four-room apartment with crumbling walls and a musty smell.

Our adjustment from a well-to-do, basically unsupervised lifestyle to living in a relatively poor and very strict household was not easy.

My parents believed that life centered on work, and money was not to be spent on anything but the necessities. Baths were only to be taken once a week and coordinated with our weekly change of clothes. We were young teenagers then 13 and 16 and had a very hard time dealing with these new restrictions. I’m sure my parents also had difficulty adjusting to taking care of us and all the economic struggles they faced.

As I grew older, I regretted not discussing with my parents the emotions they felt upon our departure, the reunion and the disappointments we children must have been in their life. Such conversations never did take place, but I am sure it would have made a big difference in both our lives.

My name is Mireille Taub. I was born in Paris in 1938. I didn’t know my name was Mireille until I became a citizen at 13—my parents always called me Mimi. They loved opera, so everything they named was named after an opera. Mireille is a very bad opera by Gounod. Mimì, of course, is the character in La bohème. My sister is Raymonde Elaine—Elena, “la Belle Hélène.” My father’s company in America was called Manon, after Manon Lescaut.

My father was originally from Poland, from a small city on the Polish-Russian border—the youngest of five children, the only surviving male, very much spoiled by the entire family. His father had died when he was young. When the First World War broke out, my grandfather—the chief baggage expediter for the main railroad line connecting St. Petersburg with Warsaw—evacuated the entire family into Russia. My father spent his early years in a small town near St. Petersburg, frequently beaten up as the outsider and the Jew. When the war ended and they returned, his mother died; he was totally orphaned at about 13. He went to live with an older sister in Warsaw, worked odd jobs, saved what he could, and eventually went to France on a visitor’s visa—overstaying it and becoming an illegal immigrant, an itinerant farm worker who followed the crops in Brittany. He learned to speak French so well that nobody ever realized he wasn’t born there. He eventually went back to Paris and learned his future occupation: he became a very skilled leather worker.

He met and married my mother during the Jazz Age. They were a very romantic couple—they got married on New Year’s Eve and tangoed their way across Paris. My mother was also Polish, born in Warsaw into a comfortable family. She had attended a Polish gymnasium, which was quite unusual for Jewish children at the time, and her mother hired a tutor for Hebrew and Yiddish. She had a beautiful singing voice and had voice lessons—hence her love of opera. I vividly remember her singing all over the house and correcting me when I played the piano badly, which was most of the time.

They never thought of going to the United States, but events changed that. Family legend has it that my great-great-grandfather visited America at the turn of the century, declared it “a land of barbarians,” and returned to Warsaw. His brother stayed in Cleveland, Ohio—and that was my grandmother’s family in America. My father had a cousin who had immigrated to Chicago before the First World War and became not only very wealthy, but well-connected—connections that would prove invaluable in saving our lives.

Dad applied for visas. My mother, my sister, and I came under the American quota safely, as my mother had become a French national. My father was a problem—he was considered stateless, a man without a country. Cousin Charlie in Chicago was able to get him what was called a Nansen passport, created by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen for people fleeing the Russian Revolution.

In September of 1939, our entire family—grandma, her husband, aunts, uncles, cousins—were on vacation in Fontainebleau when Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany. We returned to Paris: the men to join the army, the women to wait and worry. My father tried to enlist and was told, “France will surely win the war, and, if we need you, we’ll call you.” My mother was greatly relieved.

The first part of the war was called the “Phony War”—very little military action from September through April or May, when Nazi forces overran Holland and Belgium and entered France. My father was called up again at the end of May. He went to his commanding officer and said: “I’m married. I’m Jewish. Wife, two children. I have papers to go to America. If I serve in the army, which I would be proud to do, I might not live.” The commanding officer said, “Dismissed.”

My father had told my mother to pack a small suitcase. We took what he told me was the last train leaving Paris as the city was about to fall. The train was bombed—Nazi strategy was to bomb civilians—and we were lucky to get off alive. We started walking toward Bordeaux. I still have the shoes I walked in. We couldn’t get into Bordeaux; it was a closed city. The French government had retreated there to negotiate surrender. Thousands of refugees milled around the outskirts.

My father met the American consulate officer who had prepared our papers. She recognized him immediately—his paperwork was so different from any other refugee’s. She needed to get across France from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean coast, because the American consulate was being established in Marseille. She offered us a ride across France. My father provided the languages and the expertise. We crossed through Toulouse, across the Pyrenees, and eventually to the Mediterranean coast. We stopped briefly in Perpignan, where my sister needed new shoes and I, as a toddler, wandered off—they found me at the bottom of a shoe cart, very happy. A fixation with shoes.

We crossed the border into Spain. My father told me we weren’t allowed to get off the train—Franco was taking a transit tax from refugees but didn’t want them in his country. We continued on to Portugal, where my father secured passage on a Greek freighter traveling in convoy across the North Atlantic, with real concern about Nazi submarines. We arrived in the United States on August 11, 1940.

We were stopped briefly at Ellis Island—I had broken out in a rash. My mother convinced the doctor it was due to trauma and poor food, and he let us through. He was probably smart enough to know what it was. It wasn’t until years later, after retirement, that I broke out in a rash again—shingles—and realized what I’d had at Ellis Island was chickenpox. I had always wondered why I never caught children’s diseases—but, oh, yes, I had.

My father’s first word in English at Ellis Island: “taxi.” A typical New York City taxi driver took us on the scenic route all over the city and eventually brought us to HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). Dad had $10 left in his pocket. The New York family caught up with us within days. Cousin Charlie had found my father a job at Marshall Fields in Chicago, but the New York family said, “Why are you going to Chicago? New York is the fashion capital of the world.” So we stayed in New York. After the war, my father opened a small factory designing luxury handbags. I grew up in Brooklyn, a very happy child.

Little Madeleine

One of the stories about which I’ve written elsewhere is my cousin Madeleine. She was the daughter of my mother’s sister Séraphine—Séma—and her husband, who were rounded up with the Jews in Paris in 1942. Séma and her husband were sent to Vel d’Hiv, then to Drancy, then to Auschwitz. For years, the family suspected that little Madeleine, who had been the top-ranking student in her entire district, might have survived. On one of my visits to Yad Vashem, I met the chief archivist and we went through all the records. I found her listed on one of the transports. She had been separated from her parents and sent to the French prison camp at Beaune-la-Rolande, and, within several months, she, too, was sent to Auschwitz. She never survived.

Years later, I took my granddaughter Sydney to Paris for her bat mitzvah. We visited the Shoah Memorial and museum. Before the trip, I had written to a cousin asking her to make sure our family names were on the wall of names being constructed. I showed Sydney those names—family names, friends of family whose stories I knew. Then the archivist pulled out a large photograph. She called them “happy family photos”—typical vacation snapshots, everyone smiling—but, in this one, everyone was wearing the Star of David. It was taken during the occupation: a mother, father, and two teenage boys. She asked if I recognized them. I said “no”; I know names, I know stories, but I don’t remember faces. As she started to put it away, I said, “Oh, my God. That’s my mother’s cousin Daniel.” She asked if I was sure. I said I wasn’t certain, but I remembered seeing pictures of him in my mother’s album, and I gave her contact information for my cousin Nina. She said, “Probably not, because we’ve already figured out who they were—but your story confirmed what we knew.” I am not a weepy person, but I was quite upset. My granddaughter said, “Why are you crying, Grandma Mimi?” And I said: “I think of the one and a half million Jewish children who were killed, and how few have anyone left to identify them.”

Fifi

Another story concerns a family friend named Maurice Fefferman, known as Fifi. He was 10 years older than my husband and had come from Poland. During the occupation, he was part of a group of men who organized to assassinate Nazi officers—the ones who gave the orders. Many were Jewish refugees, but not all. They worked in pairs, with a pact to protect each other until death. One night on a mission, Fifi’s partner was killed. Fifi turned back to help him, was wounded and captured, brought to a French hospital, tortured—and revealed nothing about the group.

I thought it was a remarkable story of bravery. I learned later that a film was made about this group—Army of Shadows—a wonderful film, though, unfortunately, I can’t show it at our Holocaust museum because of the subtitles. Many years later, walking through the 9th arrondissement in Paris, I passed an old building with a plaque: dedicated to Maurice Fefferman, killed in 1942. I knew the story was real, but finding that plaque made it come home. I use it now in our “Acts of Courage” programming at the museum. When Maurice died, his body was released to his family for a Jewish funeral. My father-in-law attended that funeral, knowing it would be surrounded by Gestapo—another act of courage.

Uncle Léon

My mother’s brother, Uncle Léon, was my favorite among my three surviving uncles. He was charming, spoke many languages including Esperanto, and told me wonderful stories as a little girl—some of which I suspected may not have been entirely true. The story I tell about him is this: he was waiting in line for food during the occupation. The hours for Jewish shoppers were even more limited than for non-Jews. He was flirting with the young woman behind him, because Uncle Léon was good-looking and a bit of a flirt. When the shopkeeper returned with his order and said it was the last of whatever he’d requested, the woman said she wished she had it—she needed it for a sick relative. Léon, the charmer, turned to her and said, “Pour vous, mademoiselle,” and handed it to her.

They went their separate ways. Several days later, he was caught in a roundup and marched with a group of men into the local police station. The secretary at the desk was the young woman with whom he had been flirting. She managed to separate him from the group and convey to him that the others would be sent east by bus. Everybody knew what that meant at that time, but she managed—I’m not quite sure—to get him out of the building into the streets, and, from there, he went from occupied France into “unoccupied” France. I don’t know how she managed to do that: I suspect that she was part of a resistance network, and the people in the network helped him move from one place to the other. From there, he traveled south through Marseille to Casablanca, where he boarded a ship called the Serpa Pinto. On that ship, unbeknownst to each other, were my grandmother, her husband, my father’s sister and her husband, and my cousin Marcel. They all arrived in the United States in 1942.

David + Jacques

My husband David’s story will appear in another anthology, but briefly: he was sent out of Paris to a small farming community in the south when France surrendered. His brother Jacques, fighting for the French Foreign Legion, was later dismissed and joined him there. In October of 1940, Jacques took Davide back to Paris. On the train, a Nazi soldier examined David’s papers—“David Taub,” not a typical French name—and the officer must have known he was Jewish. He let them through.

Days later, Jacques was summoned to the local mairie (town hall) and arrested. He was sent to the prison camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. My mother-in-law was determined to get him out. With the help of their French neighbors—railroad workers, many of them socialist and part of the early resistance—she traveled with David from Paris to a small hamlet near the camp, knocked on a stranger’s door, and said simply, “I’m here to help my son escape.” The woman who answered—Madame Dubois—said “Absolutely not,” then invited them into the kitchen and said “We’ll talk.” Her gendarme son helped devise the escape. Jacques, a trained electrician who was permitted to go into town on a work pass, walked out with a platoon of workers on the designated day—the guard at the gate was in on it—and David had a bicycle waiting for him outside. Jacques pedaled off.

He eventually made his way to Toulon, which was being bombed by the British. He went to his employer for help, was rebuffed, realized he could be denounced, and never returned. He joined the Maquis and survived the war.

David himself was sent back to the farming village for safety. This time the conditions were harsher—he was treated like a farm laborer, given all the chores, and never quite enough food. The woman of the house said they never had to wash his plate, it was so clean. The only person who truly loved him there was the old great-grandmother, who spoke only Provençal. When a student once asked David if anything good had ever happened to him during the war, he pointed to his teeth and smiled. “I never had a cavity,” he said. “They took away my sugar ration.”

The priest in the village came to David the second time and said, “I’ll see you in church tomorrow.” David said, “I’m not converting.” The priest replied, “I’m not trying to convert you; I’m trying to save your life.” David became an altar boy and the leader of the Catholic boy scouts. He was told not to go swimming in the local stream because, obviously, he was circumcised. His name on the posted school rankings was always buried near the bottom to avoid attention—but he was the top student.

David always called his story “the kindness of strangers,” because so many decent people had reached out to help them—without obligation, without reward, simply because they were decent.

Twenty years ago, a young cousin of mine, Déborah, was chatting at the school gate with another mother at the start of the school year. They discovered that both their grandfathers had been hidden on the same farm during the occupation. Their two children became lifelong friends. Jacques nominated the farmers for Yad Vashem recognition, and David—the only one still alive who could remember them and what they did—wrote the testimony. The ceremony was held in France, and the two children who had met at the school gate gave the speech. I think that’s quite heartwarming.

I was one of the lucky ones. My dedication to my book, The Last Train to Paris, says something to the effect of: “The joke’s on you, Hitler.”

We survived, we laughed, and that’s exactly how I feel. We made a life for ourselves in America—and I hope we’ve transmitted those legacies to our grandchildren.

“Jude.” “Parasite.” “Race defiler.” “Profiteer.” “Subhuman.” “Corrupter.”

It started with language. 

What began at the political fringes preceding the Holocaust, gradually entered mainstream institutions. Jewish businesses were boycotted, while newspapers, universities, academics, and political movements helped normalize exclusion and hate followed by acts of violence. 

These ideas were further reinforced through eugenics, a morally corrupt racist theory that justified anti-Semitism as a rational scientific approach. Psychiatry and academia both lent intellectual legitimacy to theories portraying Jews as a social problem to be managed and eliminated. These ideas ultimately paved the way for the mass murder of six million Jews. 

“Colonizer.” “Oppressor.” “Zionist.” “Baby killer.” “White supremacist.”

The words have changed, but the scapegoating, moral exclusion, and abject hatred are chillingly familiar. 

Once again, Jews are recast not as individuals but as a uniquely malevolent collective threat, blamed for the world’s injustices and stripped of humanity. 

We are living in frightening times again. The latest variant of anti-Semitism, “anti-Zionism,” is a hate movement and ideology aiming to eliminate the only Jewish nation, Israel. Anti-Zionism draws on the cycle of anti-Semitism seen throughout the ages, repackaging libels and conspiracy theories into modern political language. In this latest iteration, Jews and Israelis are marked as uniquely oppressive or dangerous. Decades of disinformation filtered into the West has normalized this inversion, pushing ideas once considered extreme into the mainstream. 

The current academy, the mental health field, and many other arenas reflect a remarkable similarity to pre-war Germany. Informed by Soviet and Islamic anti-Zionism, this newer Western embodiment characterizes Israel, Israelis, and the Jewish people as powerful evil-doers.  

This is happening despite the formal codes of ethics developed in the mid-twentieth century to protect individuals from the harms that emerge when ideology overtakes clinical judgment, truth, and humanity. They emerged in part from the moral reckoning that followed World War II, when the world confronted the extent to which physicians, psychiatrists, and academics had participated in or remained silent about Nazi medical crimes and eugenic programs.

Soviet psychiatry offers another warning. Political dissenters were at times diagnosed with fabricated disorders masking ideological disagreement as mental illness. When psychiatric authority merges with political ideology, diagnosis can become a tool of repression rather than care.

Conversion therapy also offers a cautionary example. For decades, some clinicians attempted to alter patients’ sexual orientation despite mounting evidence that the practice was psychologically harmful. Ethical standards eventually recognized that therapists must not impose ideological or moral frameworks onto clients under the guise of treatment.

In recent years, a new illustration of this phenomenon has emerged. Ethical language has increasingly been used and distorted to advance political frameworks that extend unrelated to clinical care. When professional ethics are used to legitimize ideological positions, the purpose and efficacy of those codes is lost. 

In social work, particularly with the 2021 revision to the NASW Code of Ethics emphasizing social justice as a core principle, a marked shift occurred, compelling therapists to integrate activist frameworks not only in community organizing contexts but also directly into the treatment room.

Now, training programs, supervision, and professional guidance increasingly emphasizes naming systems of power, privilege, and oppression as central to clinical formulation and intervention. Social work has always grounded attention to context in the concept of Person-in-Environment. Reflected in the bio-psychosocial model, this framework asks therapists to consider social forces such as culture, systems, racism, poverty, and community as influences on a client’s experience, not as determinants of identity or moral worth.

What was once intended as a contextual lens for understanding clients has become hardened into a rigid ideological framework. Ironically, practitioners are engaging in the very thing they warn against. To use their language, they are “colonizing” the treatment space with their own projected assumptions. In this era of anti-Zionism in mental health, these therapists feel emboldened to judge who is deserving of care. This is dehumanizing, unethical practice.

Politicized approaches like decolonizing therapy will welcome Jews as long as they adhere to anti-Zionist ideology. Since the majority of Jews are Zionists, this places Jewish clients in an extremely vulnerable position. They will only be accepted for treatment if they sever part of their identity. These litmus tests have emerged both in treatment and professional spaces in ways that would not be acceptable toward any other group of people. 

Consider a client seeking care for depression, anxiety, and/or relationship issues. A therapist who believes “therapy is political” may deliberately redirect the focus of treatment to a rigid binary, rather than honoring a client’s lived experience and their connection to identity, nation, and culture.

Like the pseudoscientific eugenics movement that once shaped psychiatric practice and the conversion ‘therapies’ of the past, politicized ideological therapies can pressure clients to adopt ideas that have little to do with why they sought care. The results can be harmful by fostering anger, confusion, or self-loathing rather than healing in clients.

Some therapists insist that questioning the integration of a therapist’s personal politics into the treatment room means you are “right-wing” or morally suspect. Others frame the critique as if we are advocating that therapists should sit with a “blank slate.” Both claims are misleading and false.

Ethical practice has never required the absence of self. It requires restraint, care, and what therapists often call the “use of self.” The issue is not neutrality; it is the unethical practice of imposing ideology onto clients.

Some therapists openly describe their approach as “de-colonial” and “anti-Zionist.” How might a Jewish or Israeli patient be treated in such a space? Would they even be accepted as a patient? This is harmful practice that colonizes the treatment room with ideology and ego rather than honoring the patient’s identity and right to self-determination.

In spaces meant for learning, some clinicians present propaganda as fact. In one example, a clinician and professor presented a diagram of “the colonized mind” at an international Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) conference. Within this image of a brain, Zionism is equated with mental illness, fascism, misogyny, homophobia, rape culture, colonialism, and the worst social pathologies of our time.

The individuals who spread this disinformation use a contrived distinction between Zionist and Jew as a kind of “cover.” Meanwhile, there is no empirical research that shows efficacy or positive outcomes of decolonial therapy. Despite that, it and other political therapy approaches have been embraced by the academic and mental health institutions writ large.

These politicized frameworks paint Jews as a hyper-white race who are oppressors themselves. Because Jews are not a race but an ancient ethnicity that predates the seventeenth century invention of race as a social construct, they do not fit neatly within contemporary anti-oppressive models. 

The founders of modern psychotherapy like Freud and others are portrayed by decolonizing therapists as Eurocentric white supremacists. One popular proponent of decolonizing therapy, a licensed psychologist, calls herself a “rage doctor” and accused two contemporary Jewish founders, Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems) and Francine Shapiro (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), of misappropriation. The attempted erasure of Jewish contributions to mental health is well underway. 

Most social work graduate programs do not include the Jewish lived experience or Jewish history within their core curricula as is done with other groups. In some graduate programs, decolonizing and liberation-oriented approaches are included as required coursework. Texts and articles by extremist radical theorists that discuss or justify forms of violent resistance are sometimes assigned as legitimate course material, and anecdotally, it does not seem to be intended for critical analysis. In some cases, there appears to be theoretical endorsement of this kind of perspective as a valid form of social justice. 

Another reported incident took place when a social work professor took her graduate social work class to the Holocaust museum only to exclude Jews from their own history. The professor lectured her class on the horrors of the Shoah without naming the mass extermination of the Jewish people, instead focusing exclusively on other groups who were targeted and killed during this period, completely erasing Jewish victims. Experiences like this shape what students come to understand as ethical and historically accurate.

Relatedly, there have been incidents in some professional spaces, including listservs, of membership questions or informal expectations regarding political alignment on issues related to Israel. Disagreement with the dominant narratives in these spaces, in some cases, has led to mocking, exclusion, or professional ramifications. 

When two employees of the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lishinsky and Sarah Milgram, were shot to death in a terror attack outside the Jewish Museum, Jewish social workers posted on the NASW listserv about shock and grief. They were met not with sympathy or empathy but with accusations of genocide, calls to “Free Palestine,” and other libelous rhetoric. Therapists have been kicked out of this and other collegial groups without rational discourse if they push back on anti-Zionist narratives. 

Similarly, on another occasion, a benign acknowledgement of Jewish Heritage Month on NASW’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages were immediately plastered with Nazi inversion, abuse, and objectifying statements about Jews and Israelis. This scenario has been common. 

In practice, many Jewish students and clients have reported feeling marginalized and highly distressed in many mental health spaces. There is a growing body of literature that examines and documents concerns related to anti-Semitism, identity-based exclusion, and reported harms experienced by Jewish professionals, students and clients alike.

The Jewish Social Work Consortium (JSWC) was founded in response to concerns regarding the dehumanizing rhetoric, identity-based harm, traumatic invalidation directed at Jewish social workers and clients, and lack of institutional responsiveness within the profession. Some of the most disappointing revelations was discovering that even our governing bodies, who would presumedly speak to the breach of core ethics, would collude with their silence. 

Over a two and a half year period, our professional organization, National Association of Social Work (NASW), leadership has not responded to our countless individual letters, organizational missives, petitions, and more. These communiques were written as pleas regarding NASWs Jewish members who, as stated earlier, had been subjected to threats, insults, and mockery on their own listserv and in other public social work institutions and spaces.

In February 2026, NASW issued a public statement against the proposed expulsion of the Israeli Union of Social Workers from the International Federation of Social Workers. The vote was set in motion by the Ireland, Hellenic, and Spanish social work unions who clearly had other reasons for excluding the Israeli union. The proposed vote for expulsion was not grounded in any documented ethical violation; rather, it effectively singled out an Israeli institution. 

NASW’s public statement followed our petition that garnered over 13,000 signatures, along with media coverage and Jewish legacy organizational support and pressure. While NASW rightly finally spoke up against the potential vote of exclusion, subsequent requests for follow-up dialogue and meetings remain unanswered. Something foundational in our field has become cruelly inverted, and it’s increasingly reflected in social work academia, language, and professional attitudes.

Anti-Zionism has become increasingly normalized. There have been “Zionist lists,” which include the names of Jewish therapists projected as “Zionists,” often added because of a Jewish sounding surname. The message: Do not refer prospective clients to “The Zionists” (read: Jews).

Current anti-Zionist mental health frameworks replace older anti-Semitic libels with white-coding, portraying Jews as hyper-white oppressors. In this inversion, “Zionists” become the “bad Jews,” recast as the new Nazis. This is what former United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt describes in her horseshoe theory: political extremes that appear opposite yet ultimately meet in the same place, each relying on libels and conspiracy theories to spread Jew hatred.

While liberation psychology and decolonizing therapy may have been born with good intentions, these approaches have increasingly been co-opted into rigid frameworks that categorize entire groups, such as Jews or Israelis, a “the other.” Some liberation psychologists argue that it is ethical, or even required, under professional codes to confront clients who they might deem “fascist” complicit in injustice.

Anti-Zionist bias in many mental health professional and clinical spaces can drive this practice. Therapists may see themselves as morally obligated to “correct” or “comfort,” echoing earlier historical movements such as eugenics that presumed moral or scientific authority to enforce ideological visions.

Ethical therapy requires therapists to sit with curiosity. Listening deeply to clients’ lived experiences and exploring the interplay of culture, nationhood, race, and personal history. In social work this is called practicing cultural humility. Ethical practice resists ideological imposition and instead fosters space for clients to articulate their experiences and make meaning of their identities.

The therapeutic relationship depends on trust, openness, curiosity, and cultural humility. Clients should not have to wonder whether they must adopt a therapist’s ideological framework in order to be understood or supported. Ethical practice requires therapists to examine their own biases without projecting them onto clients, creating space for people to articulate and make meaning of their own experiences rather than being subjected to political enforcement.

When ideological conformity begins to replace curiosity and human complexity, history doesn’t feel so distant anymore. Indeed, as one walks through the halls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum it’s difficult not to feel alarmed. While we are not in the Holocaust, one can’t help but feel a chill of recognition at what unfolded during those years prior to the mass extermination of Jews and others: the dehumanizing language, the moral exclusion, the socially accepted hostility toward Jews, the groupthink. 

We know from history that hatred rarely begins with violence. It begins with rhetoric, mockery, collective blame, and most dangerously, the normalization of treating a targeted group as undeserving of empathy.

What we are seeing now feels like an echo of those earlier years. Jews and Israelis are facing harassment, intimidation, assaults, the targeting of synagogues and businesses, and deadly acts of violence. The language may have shifted from “the Jew” to “the Zionist,” but the dynamics are recognizable. In fields meant to center healing, reflection, and care, the normalization of abandoning our most basic ethical commitments and respect for human dignity reveals the danger of this moment. 

If mental health, social work, and psychology are truly committed to these principles, our institutions must take heed from the halls of history and recalibrate before further damage is done.

A massive banner has been unveiled outside Houston, Texas, featuring the face of President Donald J. Trump alongside a deeply emotional and controversial message:

“President Donald J. Trump, the first recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize, in association with FIFA, solemnly honors the memory of the thousands of innocent children murdered by the Islamic regime and its proxies.”

Below those words stands another statement impossible to ignore:

“The Islamic regime and its proxies target and kill children.”

The banner is not simply political. It is a cry. A plea. A memorial. And, above all, it is an attempt to force the world to look at something many believe has been ignored for far too long: the suffering and deaths of children across the Middle East connected to violence, proxy wars, repression, and instability.

At the center of the artwork are children standing on a football field. Not soldiers. Not politicians. Not militants. Children.

One side represents the 12 Israeli Druze children killed while playing football in Majdal Shams on July 27, 2024. The other side represents children killed inside Iran during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement of 2022 and the years of unrest and repression that followed.

Standing between them is the image of a young female referee representing Zahra Azadpour, a young footballer whose death became symbolic to many supporters of the movement.

The imagery is intentionally painful because the subject itself is painful. And the goal is simple: to make the world stop looking away.

The Purpose

This mural confronts a reality the world has too often ignored.

Human rights organizations including Amnesty International have documented cases in which Iranian security forces allegedly killed children during protests using live ammunition, metal pellets, and severe beatings.

The broader regional conflict has also devastated children far beyond Iran’s borders. In Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, years of proxy warfare, militia activity, and instability have contributed to child casualties, displacement, trauma, and humanitarian collapse.

To supporters of this mural, these are not isolated tragedies. They are part of a larger pattern of violence, extremism, repression, and proxy warfare that has stolen childhoods across the Middle East.

This mural attempts to bring those realities into one frame.

It places these children together—not as symbols of conflict, but as victims of it. Not as statistics, but as lives.

It asks the world to see clearly:

These were children.
They were playing.
They were living.
And they were killed.

Why Donald Trump?

The inclusion of President Donald J. Trump in the artwork is deliberate.

To supporters of the banner, Trump represents a leader associated with strength against the Islamic regime and a willingness to confront Iran and its regional proxy network publicly.

The artwork frames him symbolically as a figure who could help place international attention back onto the children caught in the middle of conflict, repression, terrorism, and war.

The banner is also tied emotionally to the approaching FIFA World Cup in the United States. Football is the universal language running through the entire mural.

The children are not carrying weapons; they are standing on a football field. A place that should symbolize joy, competition, laughter, and dreams.

Instead, the field becomes a memorial.

A Plea to the White House

The message of the banner ultimately transforms into an open plea:

Please see these children.
Please acknowledge them.
Please do not allow politics to erase their names.

The request is bold:

To allow the banner to be displayed in cities and venues throughout the United States during the World Cup.

Not as propaganda.
Not as a campaign.
But as a memorial.

A reminder.

A challenge to the conscience of the world.

The Message

Every name is a life.
Every life was a child.

This mural exists so they are not forgotten.
So their names are seen.
So their stories endure.

A Call to See

This work is an invitation—to pause, reflect, and look beyond headlines and borders.

Because, before anything else, they were children.

My name is Lusia Milch, and I am a survivor of the Holocaust. 

I was born December 25, 1930, to David and Necha Rosenzweig in the small Polish town of Skalat. In 1941, there were about 5,000 Jewish people in my hometown. 

Skalat was an idyllic town. There was a square adorned with four seventeenth-century stone towers, a moat, and a lot of greenery. The Jewish community, the shtetl of Skalat, was vibrant and various businesses and trades flourished, which sustained the life of a thriving Jewish community. 

My childhood was wonderful in every way. I was surrounded by family, including grandparents and many uncles, aunts, and cousins who were my playmates. I grew up in a lovely home with a living room that was beautifully decorated. I remember my mother’s cooking as being the best in the world. Every day we had soup made with ingredients fresh from the local market.

After Hitler came to power, everything changed for the Jews. Jewish people became easy targets for hate as anti-Semitism grew. Jewish stores were boycotted and negative stereotypes of Jews were promoted through propaganda. Children were taught the Jews cannot be trusted because they were only interested in money and taking advantage of people. 

The vicious anti-Semitism grew so severely, I feared what would happen to us. I vividly remember the first day of the German occupation of my town. On July 4, 1941, the Nazis entered Skalat with their swastika flags. The non-Jewish Ukrainian population of Skalat lined the streets, beautifully dressed in their national colors of yellow and blue to warmly welcome the Germans. Immediately, those townspeople who had been our neighbors and our friends turned on us and carried out a day of terror against the Jews in Skalat. 

Like wild beasts, they grabbed innocent Jewish men from their homes and on the streets and viciously beat them in the town square while the Germans looked on, took pictures. Gone was my carefree childhood and the freedom as a Jew. Soon came the decrees. First, we were ordered to wear a white armband with a Star of David on our right arm. Second was forced labor. Every day, hundreds of Jewish men were ordered to work in the quarries, chopping boulders into stones for gravel, which the Germans used to pave roads for the tanks and trucks. 

Third, a decree forming the ghetto. The once thriving shtetl of Skalat became a ghetto filled with thousands of Jews from surrounding towns. The population more than doubled, and the people had to live on the streets in cramped conditions without sanitary facilities. Diseases spread quickly. Life was reduced to surviving one day at a time. The Germans came into Skalat with the goal of destroying us. Over a period of two days, more than 3,000 Jews were transported by truck and by train to the extermination camp, Bełżec, where they were immediately murdered by gas. 

Seven hundred of us survived the roundups. My once beautiful world was reduced to a cramped homemade bunker in the basement of our neighbor’s house. We slept there, three or four people in one bed. Whatever possessions we had were on the bed. We ate on the bed. We planned escapes on the bed. My life was reduced to whatever I could do on the bed. 

At the end of the second year of the German occupation, the time came to leave our hiding place. My mother explained we were going to a non-Jewish family who had promised to hide us in exchange for our possessions. As we approached the house, we heard terrifying shootings coming from the ghetto. An action had started. It was fast, loud, full of terrible screams. 

People everywhere were running, and we too started to run as fast as we could. We reached the house where we hoped to be safe. We pushed our way inside and found ourselves standing in front of a man, his wife, and two small children. In a loud, angry voice, the man yelled: “What are you doing here? You must get out of here immediately.”

“We cannot leave. An action has started, and you promised to hide us,” pleaded my mother. “I have no hiding place. I want you out of here right now.” He started to push us out of the room as my mother continued to plead. “Have mercy on my children. The streets are full of Germans,” she sobbed, “and if we go out, we will be killed.”

The man’s wife demanded that we be thrown out immediately. In the ensuing commotion, my mother turned her head quickly and stared at me. Afraid to talk to me while she’s negotiating with him, my mother gives me a look with her eyes, a desperate look. Afraid to say one word, I look at my mother. Our eyes met. I read in her desperate look what she was telling me. “Now is the time. What I told you all the time, leave us. Run. Save yourself.”

I had the strength of running from death. I jumped, and I find myself on the roof. And when I fell down in that panic, I took a look, and I saw a hole. I knew, one way or the other, that’s where I have to go. And I pulled down the rest of the straw and some of the dirt, leaving only one little place. For what? To breathe. It doesn’t take more than maybe 20 minutes or a half hour, a German comes in, and he comes up to the attic. My nose was away from him maybe that much. I felt if I don’t breathe, he cannot know that there was somebody there, and he didn’t. He was there minutes only, and he leaves. 

I spent there the rest of the day. It’s dark, and I am exhausted, and I fall asleep. After the night, the morning comes. I hear somebody coming up to the attic. He comes up, and he says, “Who is here?” I came out, and he says, “You were here when the Germans were inspecting?” He had a heavy stick, and he had an axe, and I knew that I was in, in a very dangerous situation. I said, “Listen to me. I will go out, and they will spot me right away, and they will say, ‘Where were you hiding?’ I will say, ‘There was a nice man. He let me hide in his attic.’” He said, “But that’s a lie.” I said, “But they will not believe that it wasn’t like that.” I said, “Do me a favor. Let me stay here the day. I promise you, as soon as it gets dark, you can come up.” He said, “I will kill you if you stay another minute after it gets dark.”

After the night, I went down. The door was opened, and I came out. From that day on, I was on my own. By 1943, my mother, stepfather, and four-year-old sister had been murdered, along with nearly all the members of my extended family and the Jewish community of Skalat. At the age of 12, I was on my own in a totally hostile environment for the next two years. I survived by pretending to be a Ukrainian peasant girl, living a false life in a tiny village until liberation by the Soviet Army. In an orphanage, in a displaced persons camp, and often sleeping under the open sky, I made my way across Europe and sailed to New York, where I began my new life again as a Jew.

My message to you today is the following: I, Lusia Rosenzweig Milch, am 95-years-old and a Holocaust survivor. It is difficult to fully describe the suffering to which the Jews of my town, Skalat, were subjected. There, we were isolated, incarcerated, extorted, starved, and finally murdered. 

Out of almost 10,000, only 160 Jews survived. An ancient hatred, anti-Semitism, led to the murder of over 6 million Jews, including one and a half million children, the future of our people, gone forever. I ask you today to listen to eyewitnesses such as myself. Read, educate yourself, write to your representatives, and pledge never again. Never permit such a Holocaust to happen again. Do something before it is too late, or such events can happen again. 

The one thing I will not accept is to do nothing. With your help, we shall prevail.