It’s 1:30 A.M. on the sixth night of Pesach.

You’re hungry, but there is nothing to eat. The leftovers are gone, your Pesach stash is running low… there’s only one thing left to do.

Matza.

There’s always Matza.

You go and amble over to the nearest open box of Matza you can find, fumbling around in the dark.

It’s just Matza. No need to turn the lights on.

You grab the box and bring it over to the sink, where you eat it to avoid getting crumbs everywhere, like a civilized person.

You eat the Matza over the sink knowing, somewhere in your soul, that this will truly fill you up. It is enough.

But you don’t want to eat only Matza. You would normally be eating the most delightful little secret snacks at 1:30 in the morning. But now you’re eating Matza, over the sink, like a civilized person.

A moment of genius strikes.

You amble over to the olive oil, and you bring it over to your Matza party by the sink. You pour a little on, still in the dark, hopelessly guessing as to how much you’re using.

The image of an Italian man you once met appears in your mind. He is proud of you for thinking of olive oil in your time of need.

Another thought – salt.

Salt?

Salt.

Salt and olive oil and now you’re in business.

Add the vinegar. Do it. Do it now.

You add the balsamic vinegar to your Matzah soaked in olive oil that you’re eating over the sink.

You put a little salt on it, then another layer of Matza.

You have created the Olive Oil Matza Sandwich.

All around the world, Italians can be found crying, screaming, throwing up. The very notion of an Olive Oil sandwich is absurd – but it’s the sixth night of Pesach, and you’re desperate.

It’s Matza and anything goes at this point.

In your mind, there’s a memory of a brightly colored piece of candy, a pastry, perhaps, the kind of thing you used to eat at this hour.

But all of those things seem like such delicacies now. You are stuck eating your bread of affliction, over the sink, like a civilized person, feeling far too accomplished for having put oil and vinegar on bread.

But that’s the miracle of Matza and the Pesach holiday. Eating this simple food, even for just eight days out of the year, reminds us of how lucky we are to be able to eat such wondrous things, at any hour of the day. Eight days of Matza would make even the biggest cynic grateful to live in such an abundant world.

The feeling lasts about as long as the last bits of Matza remain in your system. After that, we go back to taking our abundance for granted and fearing the approach of the next Pesach, but the Festival of Matza gives us that brief reprieve to experience true gratitude.

~

When I was younger, I didn’t understand Matza.

I still don’t, but at least know I understand that I don’t understand.

The world of Conservative Judaism that I come from tends to look at religious obligations as burdensome. Kashrut is a burden, Shabbos is a burden, but Pesach is the biggest burden of all.

Although we were Ashkenazi, many of us would eat kitniyot, items which Sefardic rabbis permitted for Pesach but not their Ashkenazi counterparts, because of a special “papal dispensation.” That was the joke we used to make.

Then, the Union of Conservative Judaism did actually give dispensation for all Conservative Jews to eat kitniyot in 2015.

As I have become more religious, I have stopped eating kitniyot.

But not for religious reasons. At least, not exactly.

I have stopped eating kitniyot out of my respect and admiration for Matza. But, to explain why, I have to tell you a bit of a long story.

It begins in 2022, in Crown Heights.

I had been teaching in a Yeshiva for about six months, and I had been learning about Torah and Mitzvot from my students. They convinced me that wrapping Tefillin was more important than basically anything else, and so, with some financial help from my Chabad rabbi, I purchased my first set and began wrapping.

In late March, I went to a Jewish teaching conference in Princeton, New Jersey. I met up with the Rebbetzin of the Princeton Chabad, and we caught up a little bit.

When I told her I was becoming more religious, she gushed with joy. She told me that while I was in New York, I should go to Crown Heights and check out 770 Eastern Parkway, the heart of the Chabad movement.

She asked a friend of hers to show me around. He took me to 770, where he taught me the full Shema (which I had never learned), to Gombo’s Heimiche Bakery, which has the best babka in the world (328 Kingston Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11213-4328, for anyone interested), and, finally, to a Matza Bakery.

(The Babka in question.)

The Matza Bakery was on the first floor of an apartment building.

My guide explained that the bakery opened every fall, around October or November, and it ran day and night until the beginning of Pesach.

Families in the neighborhood could rent it out to bake their own Matzah. It seemed like a very fun tradition, complete with teenage boys breaking matza on each others’ heads, older family members yelling and then giving up, and, of course, the one older uncle whose job it is to say, “you know, they’re working us harder than Pharoah in here.”

It is my understanding that someone has made this joke, in every single Matza Bakery, every Pesach, since the Exodus.

Inside of the Matza Bakery is a sealed cage. One person stands inside of the cage. He is responsible for mixing the flour and water.

There is no other water anywhere in the bakery because once water touches flour, an 18 minute timer begins. After 18 minutes, the dough is considered leavened and therefore unkosher for Pesach.

Everything happens under incredible pressure.

The flour goes into the cage, the cage guy mixes it, then the dough is taken out, kneaded, rolled, perforated, and baked. The oven is wildly hot, and everyone is sweating.

It has the same intensity as the New York Stock Exchange.

Except, instead of moving billions of dollars around, they’re moving flour, water, and dough.

But they treat the Matza with the same urgency and intensity that traders treat their trades.

When the family finishes the baking for the day, their Matza is placed into a sealed container to keep it safe for Pesach.

This is why hand-made Matza is called “Shmorah Matza,” literally, “Guarded Matza.”

Every single step of the Matza-making process must be guarded with the utmost vigilance.

The question is, why?

As someone who had grown up hating the restrictions of Pesach, it took me a long time to understand why religious people take Matza so seriously. It’s just flour and water.

But that’s exactly why they do it.

Matza is food. It is the epitome of food. It is the Platonic Form of form.

Flour and water. That’s it.

The rabbis teach that there are some things so fundamental to the universe that they actually pre-date creation. These are things like Torah, Shabbos, and Moshiach.

And Matza.

Matza is the simplest thing that a person needs to survive. One could live their entire life on Matza alone. It would be bland, but it can be done.

The Pesach holiday gives us eight days to remember this fact, to remember that life is simple and can be lived on Matza alone.

Chametz, leavened bread, is nice, but not necessary. We prefer chametz to Matza, so much so that we are willing to pay exorbitant prices for fresh baked bread outside of Pesach, but we would never eat the cheap matza alternative if we didn’t have to.

Chametz is unnecessary.

But how much of our lives is Chametz? How much of our lives is dedicated to the pursuit of the things we want, not the things we need?

The nice car, the bigger house, the cooler parties – all of these things are chametz.

And our pursuit of these things makes us unhappy in the long-run.

Since October 7th, I have found myself living with less and less chametz in my life.

And not by choice.

The parties I liked to go to have quietly excluded Zionists. The places where I liked to read poetry have loudly excluded Zionists. Even the professions I wanted to pursue have excluded Zionists.

While all of these things have been painful, none have been life-threatening.

They were way-of-life threatening.

My way-of-life was quite decadent by Pesach standards, and many of the decadent aspects of secular western life that I enjoyed have slowly disappeared because of my choice to be a Zionist.

As I eat my Matza this week, I have found myself reflecting on that.

Matza, I realized, is the bread of Zionism.

It is the hurried food you make as you flee your home and travel to the unknown. It is the simple bread you bake when you arrive in a desolate land with nothing. And it is the bread you eat when your passion for Israel is greater than your desire for Chametz.

A lot of Jews are terrified about what is happening in their countries, but they are afraid to move to Israel.

Some are scared of the possibility of missile attacks, but many are more concerned about the certainty of scarcity.

Israel is not a land of ease.

Her homes are made of reinforced concrete. Her fields only yield their wheat to extreme sweat. Everything is hard.

Life in the west, even with all of its antisemitism, is easy.

We have packages that arrive at our doorsteps and meals that arrive fully cooked.

But Matza reminds us that we don’t need any of that, we just want it.

But what do we need?

Do we need the nice amenities of western life? Or do we need the freedom we can only feel in Israel?

Ultimately, it is up to each of us to determine what it is that we need and what it is that we want, and the Pesach holiday only gives us 8 days to reflect on this.

At the end of Pesach, we will return to eating chametz and our lives of relative luxury. We could easily avoid asking ourselves these questions again until next Pesach, but we shouldn’t.

We should ask ourselves who we are, and what we need, and what we want.

We should take this time to reflect upon the bread of affliction that predates creation, the journey of the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land, and where we are today as Jews.

Matza is a miracle whose simplicity must be guarded with the utmost scrutiny. Our lives are also a miracle of simplicity, though we are quick to overcomplicate them with chametz.

Pesach reminds us that life can be stripped down, that much of what we chase is not necessary, and that freedom sometimes asks us to leave comfort behind.

It reminds us that what we need is simple, but what we want is not.

Chag Sameach

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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It was beautiful.

It was the only place in all of London where one could still see hostage posters. Everywhere else, they had been torn down.

A friend of mine had taken me there to try Pita, the best kosher spot for falafel in the whole city. Ask any Jew from London, they’ll tell you the same.

After we had lunch, we walked around the town before going to the cemetery.

The Golders Green cemetery boasts some very famous permanent residents: Sigmund Freud, Keith Moon, Peter Sellers, just to name a few.

I paid homage to the burial site of Mark Bolan, the lead singer of T.Rex and one of my all-time favorite rockstars.

It was not until I saw his grave in Golders Green that I realized he was Jewish.

Of course, with the hair, I should have known. But who would ever think a rockstar could be just another Yid from Golders Green?

The cemetery closed at sunset, and, as we were leaving, I saw this beautiful sight.

The sunset above the crematorium – one of G-d’s strangest beauties.

It was on this trip to England that I came to realize what I had long already known – the golden age of Jews was over.

In the United States, the legacy of Jews in the 20th century casts a long shadow. The cultural power of bagels and Jerry Seinfeld still insulates us from the reality that Europe is already experiencing.

The day after I went to the cemetery, I stopped by a very popular bagel shop.

This was not a kosher bagel shop — they served bacon and corned beef.

But the cashier was Jewish. She was very sweet, a little shy. I noticed that she was wearing a Hebrew necklace.

“Is that your name?” I said, pointing at her necklace.

She smiled and clutched her necklace.

Then, she dropped her head and hid her face. She leaned into the cash register and whispered,

“Are you Jewish?”

In a hush, I said, “yes.”

She wrapped up my bagel and handed me my change. She looked up briefly, gave me a quick smile, then went back to her work as if nothing had happened.

But first, she slipped the necklace under her shirt.

Growing up with the hubris of post-war American Jews, I never imagined I would see such a sight.

Now, I even see it here.

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England’s history with the Jews is long and complex. But, since the Jews were brought back in 1653, England has been one of the most tolerant nations in all of Europe.

Golders Green was a testament to that. Jews walked around proudly and showed their Judaism without fear.

Now, the only Jews who wear their Judaism without fear are the ones in the cemetery.

Soon enough, their graves will be defaced too.

The antisemitism in England is unique in that it seems to be 12-18 months ahead of the antisemitism everywhere else.

For example, in October 2021, a car filled with people wearing Keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags drove through the streets of Golders Green chanting, “F*ck the Jews! Rape their wives, rape their daughters!”

That was one year before Hamas attacked on October 7th, doing precisely that.

Less than a day after, antisemites around the world were jumping with joy and praising what had happened in Israel.

Even the wife of the mayor of the most Jewish city in the world joined in the depraved bacchanalia.

Jews in England have been leaving in droves, and the pace of their flight has been greatly increasing.

The institutions of the English state have made it abundantly clear that the desires of the Muslim plurality outweigh the safety of the Jewish minority. It is clear that the British government will tolerate almost anything to avoid offending those they are afraid to offend.

If the government is willing to look the other way on a rape-scandal on the order of the Epstein files, then they are certainly willing to look the other way on a couple of ambulances being bombed.

They will condemn the activities, and they may even apprehend some individuals, but the system is not going to change.

The gentlemen who had been detained regarding the chants in 2021 were released and found not guilty just last year.

Do you think those men had any influence on the men who lit these ambulances on fire? Do you think they knew each other? Or went to the same mosque?

These questions are, of course, purely hypothetical.

The deeply sad irony here is that they targeted Hatzolah Ambulances.

Hatzolah was founded to provide Emergency medical assistance to Jews, since so many places refused to provide the service to Jews in the first place, but Hatzolah helps plenty of non-Jews as well. They are funded by the Jewish community, but they serve everyone.

Except those four vans.

This is not the first time antisemites have made war on Jewish health services.

Protesters chanted outside of a children’s cancer research facility in 2024 because of its “Zionist identity.”

The children and the nurses were the primary recipients of their chanting.

Iran struck the Weizmann Institute of Science with a ballistic missile. The WIS is one of the leading cancer-research facilities in the world, and earlier this year they announced a possible cure for Hodgkin lymphoma.

And, of course, there is Hamas’ war against the Palestinian health infrastructure, as they have done everything in their power to endanger Palestinian patients and caregivers.

But Golders Green does not teach us about the past of antisemitism, it shows us the future.

No one believed we could live in a world where our neighbors would march and chant things like “Kill the Jews, rape their wives, rape their daughters,” in 2021.

No one believed synagogues would get attacked and newscasters would defend the perpetrator over the victims.

No one believed that they could find themselves living in Golders Green, but here we are.

With everything going on, it’s only a matter of time before these attacks start happening during daytime and when there are people around.

You might feel safe in your neighborhoods, with your private security teams and metal detectors at your shuls, for now. But private security only goes so far. There is only so much money in the world.

The Jews of England are waking up.

Their ancestral clocks have stopped ticking; they know their time is up.

It might be ten years; it might be twenty, but, sooner or later, the only Jews left in Golders Green will be the ones buried in the cemetery.

Look around your community. Look with honest eyes. Ask yourself, how much longer do you have?

Because this isn’t 1936. This is not the time when Jews suddenly get stuck and can’t travel anymore.

This is 1926. The writing is on the wall, but there is still time to get out.

Of course, that also means there is plenty of time to convince yourself that it’s not time to get out.

Just don’t lie to yourself. Lying to yourself is the most dangerous thing you can do.

There are wise and prudent things you can do to prepare without fleeing, yet.

You can liquidate your assets, or as much as you think you would need in a pinch. You should have an up to date passport and a good amount of cash, preferably in several currencies. You need to have some kind of hard currency, gold or silver, or even jewels, things you can move and hide on your person.

You might think this is alarmist – it absolutely is.

If burning ambulances and fleeing school children doesn’t set off alarms deep within your soul, your grandparents failed you.

Or you have failed them.

If he who burns books will one day burn people, what do you think he who burns ambulances will do one day?

I am praying that I am wrong. Every day, I pray to G-d that the world will prove me wrong. And, every day, I have to renew my prayer.

I’d rather sound the alarm too early than too late.

The sun has set on the Jews of Europe, and it’s making its way west. A long dark night is ahead of us – make sure you are prepared.

But, even as we prepare for darkness, we must always remember to spread love and light in this world.

Who knows, maybe the little bit of light you spread will be enough to tip the scales in favor of love.

Be ready, be prepared, and always be spreading your light.

Am Yisrael Chai

~

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(The Blind leading the Blind, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568)

Antisemitism is the opiate of little minds. No reasonable person could believe that a group of 15 million people could run all of the nefarious machinations of our world.

There are too few Jews to be that powerful, and too many Jews to be that united.

Antisemitism is as intellectually weak as it is civilizationally catastrophic.

It anesthetizes the mind in a painless and pleasant fog, one in which the believer bears no responsibility for understanding the world as it is – all things in life are caused by the Jews.

However, no mind wants to conceive of itself as weak. No one wants to believe that he has fallen for such a foolish proposition.

So the mind never admits to its foolishness; it soothes itself with all manner of rationalizations and explanations.

“It is not antisemitism – it’s antizionism.”

“I’m just noticing things.”

“Well, why do they have so much influence?”

The rapid rise of antisemitism in the West, on both the right and the left, reflects the rapid decline of our reason more than anything else.

In the 20th century, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching remedial English in universities.

In the 21st century, we have all but forsaken learning altogether.

Our schools were failing decades before Covid; the state they are in now is beyond the capabilities of the English language.

Our children cannot read, they cannot write, and they cannot even spell—should we be surprised that so many fall for something as intellectually empty as antisemitism?

For decades, we have turned a blind eye to the degradation of education, and now we are reaping the consequences.

We lowered one standard after another, until we eventually abandoned the concept of standards altogether.

(The Village School, Jan Steen, 1670)

Without the ability to read, our children cannot reason.

They cannot distinguish the literal from the figurative – how could they tell the difference between logic and deception?

The goal of education is to cultivate adults who can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. That is why we divide education into four major subjects, language, history, math, and science: all teach a different discipline for understanding truth.

By letting our standards for passing students slide into nothingness, we have let their cognitive abilities slip into nothingness as well.

The rise of antisemitism bodes ominous.

Not only because of what it means for the Jews, but for what it means for the West.

It means that the West has lost its reason.

Whether by accident or by choice, the West abdicated its responsibility to teach its children. It pretended to do so, issuing diplomas amid pomp and circumstance as though nothing had changed, but it had.

Every Jew hater is yet another fool for the circus, a man whose mind exists to entertain and be entertained, not to understand and be understood.

Education and antisemitism are twin issues, two heads of the same beast. Ignorance is sweet at the first sip but deadly at the last drop. There are wolves among the sheep, yet our young are not sheep, for at least sheep have the ability to know a wolf when they see one.

Every day, new leaders cower to the masses and drink from this ignorant draft.

Civilizations that give in to their ignorant impulses, from the Babylonians to the Nazis, collapsed in short order.

The religious mind looks at that fact and surmises that it was God’s eternal promise.

The logical mind looks at it, sees the absurdity of antisemitism, and concludes that any civilization taken in by such an absurdity was doomed to collapse from the start.

Both minds look at the West and tremble.

There may be time yet to save the West, but only if we can take a critical look at how we educate ourselves and our children. We do not need new modes of education; we need to return to the standards of the old. The West abdicated reason long ago. Unless we return to it, we are doomed to an unreasonable fate.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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(The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich 1850)

The Tides of Time 

A fog of evil tidings 
Hangs low above the shore, 
The winds of time are biting, 
But their chill remains ignored. 

The fish have all gone hiding, 
While the angler tends his chores,
He thinks they’re just not biting, 
For he knows not what’s in store. 

But the tides of time are rising, 
The waves grow more and more, 
The wicked clouds are writhing, 
While the man withdraws indoors. 

The winds will wrack the hollows, 
And the waves will test the boards, 
The tack may soon be swallowed,
And hope will be unmoored. 

But now it’s just the fog, 
That plagues the placid sea. 
So the sailor tends his cog, 
And looks down at his feet. 
But there is something darker, 
Lurking down beneath, 
A kind of silent thunder, 
Hidden by the deep. 

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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(Yossi Dresner, Z”L)

“Again with the no Kippah?!”

Yossi’s voice bellowed after my friend and I as we ran through the synagogue.

Yossi was one of those men who was about 4 feet tall, but he seemed to tower over everyone else in the room.

He had short white hair, small warm eyes, and he always wore a smile, wherever he went, except when he was yelling at us for not wearing a Kippa.

He was the synagogue’s “Ritual Director,” but he was so much more than that.

His formal responsibilities was running the daily minyan. As fewer and fewer people went to minyan every day, Yossi’s minyan remained. It was the last non-Orthodox daily minyan in the valley.

And it ran, on time, every day that Yossi was alive. 7:30 in the morning, and 5 or 6 at night, depending on daily light savings.

In the more religious world, they call the person who did what Yossi did the “Shamash,” or “the sun.”

Yossi was as consistent as the sun.

More consistent, actually. Rain never stopped Yossi.

He was an old man by the time I knew him, in his 70s. He was born in Israel just before Independence, and he served as a paratrooper in the 1956 War.

His love for G-d and his love for Israel touched everything he did.

As a child getting yelled at, I didn’t always know that. I understand it now.

I got to know Yossi better as an adult, when I started becoming more religious. I began attending his minyan, and, despite being younger than everyone else by at least three decades, I quickly became one of the crew.

Most people in the community only came to the minyan when there was a life event. Sometimes to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah or wedding, but usually to mourn a loved one.

It was a great comfort to know that Yossi would always be there, with his minyan, whenever the community needed it.

But Yossi didn’t do what he did for the community, he did it for G-d.

In a world increasingly uncomfortable with the divine, Yossi wore his faith proudly on his sleeve. He was not Orthodox; he was even known to love the occasional McDonald’s vanilla milkshake, but he was serious.

He was serious about G-d, and he was serious about Judaism.

Serious enough to be the last person in the community to complain when kids forgot their kippot.

When my mom asked him why he still did all of the things he did, even in his 80s, he said, in his warm Israeli accent:

“I can’t help it – I just believe.”

It was not until I spent time in the Orthodox community that I understood how lucky I was to have a person like Yossi in my community. There are plenty of people who follow Judaism for plenty of reasons, but there are very few people who have as pure and as joyous a faith as Yossi.

When Yossi davened Kabbalat Shabbat, I felt as though I was transported through time, into the world of the prayers.

As Yossi sang, in the beautiful Hebrew:

“Adonai sat enthroned at the Flood;

Adonai sits enthroned forever,”

I felt like I was there, at the flood, with Yossi. Yossi’s eyes were closed, G-d sat upon his throne, and Yossi was singing.

תהילים כ״ט:י׳

יְ֭הֹוָה לַמַּבּ֣וּל יָשָׁ֑ב וַיֵּ֥שֶׁב יְ֝הֹוָ֗ה מֶ֣לֶךְ לְעוֹלָֽם׃

Psalms 29:10

GD sat enthroned at the Flood;
G-D sits enthroned, ruler forever.

The closer shabbat came, the closer I felt to G-d. With each passing prayer, with each word from each psalm, I felt like I was getting closer and closer to shabbat.

They say that the shabbos angels accompany a man on his way home from shul, singing along with him as he hums the tunes he remembers.

If that’s true, those angels learned how to sing from Yossi.

When the monsters and demons of October 7th invaded our homes, Yossi hung an Israeli flag over a chair.

A darkness hung over Yossi from that day until the day he died.

But minyan never started late.

No matter what was going on in the world, Yossi’s minyan was meeting at 7:30 in the morning and 5 o’clock at night.

After praying one evening, I walked Yossi to his car. He walked out of the shul, kissed the mezuzah, and took a deep breath.

He smiled and said, “ahh, spring time, the air just smells beautiful, you know?”

Yes Yossi, I know.

I know because you taught me how to smile at the world.

Yossi never taught me formally, but he taught me by example.

He knew Torah, but he would balk if anyone ever compared him to a Rabbi.

He taught me how to treat people, how to treat the Torah, and how to treat G-d.

Today, we will inaugurate a new Torah scroll in his honor. It will sit in the hall where he led minyan all these years.

The great rabbis teach us that Moses was never buried, but his body was interred within the Torah, and every time a soul reads a word of Torah, it is as though they are leaving a stone upon the grave of Moshe Rabbeinu.

I cannot help but think that Yossi is buried there too.

The last time I talked to Yossi, I asked him for a blessing.

I was going to Jerusalem to study Torah, and I wanted him to give me a formal blessing, the ancient kind, with his hands upon my head.

But that was not Yossi’s way.

Yossi gave me his own blessing, to learn well and come back and teach them what I learned.

“And where are you going to be?” He asked.

“In Yerushalayim.” His face opened up into a big smile.

“Ahhhh, Yerushalayim. You know, my whole life, I’m Tel Aviv. But, Jerusalem, you know,” he paused and took a deep breath, “there is just something about the air there, it’s so special. You can smell it when you’re on the bus coming up from Tel Aviv. Oh, Jerusalem.”

Those were the last words Yossi ever said to me.

“Oh, Jerusalem.”

With a big smile on his face.

When Yossi ran his afternoon minyan, he would always teach a little Torah in between Mincha and Maariv. One is the afternoon prayer service, and one is the evening prayer service.

He would teach a little Torah, we would say Kaddish d’Rabbanan, a prayer for Israel, then Hatikvah, and then we would move into Maariv.

This was Yossi’s tradition. He also had a tradition that, after prayers were concluded and the announcements were made, he would say, “Enjoy Life. G-d bless the United States, G-d bless Israel, and G-d bless you all.”

And we would all respond, “And G-d bless Yossi!” He hated that, but he didn’t stop us.

While I was in Jerusalem, I studied a section of Talmud about minyan times.

The rabbis were arguing about whether or not one can pray Mincha right before sunset and then Maariv right after, as we had done in the Yossi minyan!

I became very concerned.

Was it possible that Yossi’s minyan was actually a violation? Was he not allowed to have a Mincha/Maariv minyan held together?

Well, according to Rabbi Yehuda, one can pray one service after the other IF one makes a clear and substantial separation between the two.

But what constitutes a clear and substantial separation?

If one has enough time to teach a Torah lesson in between, that counts as a substantial separation.

Ah, but what counts as enough Torah to be a Torah lesson?

If you teach enough Torah that you have to say Kaddish d’Rabbanan after.

I looked up from my Talmud and smiled.

Here I was, sitting in Jerusalem, 7000 miles away from Yossi, realizing just how brilliant he was. This wasn’t his tradition – this was an ancient tradition, codified in the Talmud.

I was excited to tell Yossi that the jig was up, and I knew what he was doing, but I never got the chance to.

When I returned to Los Angeles after that trip, I went back to his Minyan.

Nothing had changed. It was the same group of people, at the same time, in the same room, like always.

When I walked in, all of my old friends smiled and rushed to greet me. I took my seat and began davening.

After Mincha, the leader asked me if I had learned any Torah in Jerusalem that I wanted to share.

I shared that lesson about Rabbi Yehuda, and I talked about how Yossi had quietly tricked all of us into following the Talmudic law without ever mentioning it.

I had forgotten that Yossi had asked me to come back and teach what I had learned. I forgot that until just now. But I guess that was just Yossi’s way. Everything was so subtle, so humble. He gave me a blessing that I wasn’t expecting, and it came true. And now we’re both smiling about it.

I have this silly little dream that, one day, I’ll be sitting in shul, and I will see a little boy running by, and I will get to yell at him, “again with the no Kippa?”

It is a strange aspiration I know, but it is one I have nonetheless.

With everything going on in the world, all of the war, all of the hatred, all of the confusion and all of the anger, I find myself asking, “what would Yossi do?”

“What would Yossi say if I was talking to him right now?”

But I know exactly what he would say.

He would say: “Minyan is at 7:30 and 6 o’clock. We pray here, every day. Enjoy life. G-d bless the United States, G-d bless Israel, and G-d bless you.”

And G-d bless you, Yossi, wherever you are.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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(Still of Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later)

What is rage?

Rage is a kind of anger that consumes its host entirely.

We do not “feel angry,” but we “become enraged.” It is pathological, and our society has become saturated with it.

The film 28 Days Later opens with a group of masked animal rights activists breaking into a medical research facility to release the infected chimpanzees under experimentation.

“Infected with what?” the activist says…

“In order to cure, you must first understand...”

“Infected with WHAT?”

“Rage.”

Rage. That’s the last word we hear before the lock clicks open and the chimp runs out, killing everything in its path.

The rage spreads from person to person, erasing their humanity from within.

Since 2016, our society has been overturned by scandal after scandal. These scandals broke our sense of trust and eroded our faith, first in the system, and then in one another. And, after this decade of unending scandal, it appears that we too have become infected with a pathological rage.

~

The Epstein files may be the scandal that finally broke society’s back.

When one looks back at the past ten years, the sheer number of major scandals that took place is almost breathtaking.

From email scandals to pandemic deception to leadership opacity, the pattern repeated itself until deception seemed to be the norm.

Our public trust was already at an all-time low, and these emails reveal that the rot beneath these institutions was even greater than we realized.

Distrust is contagious. It spreads through the population like a disease.

Distrust breeds anger, anger begets rage. And we have become enraged.

On the surface, our rage is politically motivated. We express our rage at our political enemies, believing them to be the source of it. We stand off against each other in the streets, screaming through at one another, “there he is! That’s the source of my rage.”

The right blames the left, and the left blames the right, but the rage is the same.

However, as we teach 5 year olds, no one can “make you angry.” People will do what they are going to do; you choose to let yourself become angry in response.

But 5-year-olds possess a level of social trust and personal honor that we adults have lost.

We have let ourselves become enraged, and now the rage is all that’s left.

That’s the beauty of 28 Days Later.

It’s not a zombie movie; it’s a rage movie.

Rage turns men into zombies. It deprives them of their agency and their humanity.

28 days after rage is introduced into the population, England is no more.

What happens when we hit 28 scandals – when so many things have shattered our trust, that there is no going back? What happens when we start turning to violence as the most expedient form of discourse?

Maybe we already have.

If you look at the conversations about Epstein, not the ones happening on the news, the ones happening in the comments section on social media, you will see a kind of blind rage that is unlike anything we have seen before.

Epstein is the new Rothschild; the latest receptacle for all of the world’s fears.

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People who feel displaced by modernity, young men who are downwardly mobile, see the Epstein scandal as proof that they have been lied to and manipulated by the powers that be.

They have begun to ascribe everything to Epstein, everything from the Iraq War to the creation of 4chan and alt-right antisemitism.

I don’t know if Jeffrey Epstein was behind the development of the alt-right on 4chan. I don’t know a lot of things about this scandal, and I know that there is no way to know anything.

The danger of theories like this is not that they are true; it is that they cannot be disproven.

Rage does not respond to reason; it responds to rage.

No amount of logic, evidence, or facts can stop it.

The release of these files did not initiate our interpersonal distrust; it exacerbated it. It has accelerated the spread of our rage, and it has made us empty and hollow.

We have lost the ability to speak; we can only scream.

(The Scream, by Edvard Munch, 1893)

So what can we do?

What can men do against such reckless hate? How can we rise above the social rage and distrust that surrounds us?

We can be courageous.

We can refuse to let our anger become rage. We can privilege our humanity over our hatred.

Courage is the refusal to surrender our moral agency to our baser instincts, even when hope feels impossible.

Rage makes men small. A man enraged is ruled by fear. But courage makes men grow. A man encouraged is governed by his hope, and hope, while more fragile than fear, is far more powerful. Fear enslaves the mind; hope liberates it.

Rage may be contagious, but so is courage.

And it takes courage to be hopeful in times like these.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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It seems that the final victim of the culture war is culture itself.

The “debates” about Bad Bunny’s halftime show are so ridiculous that we ought to be embarrassed.

We are talking about a pop singer’s performance at the Super Bowl like it was the Council of Trent.

News flash – it wasn’t.

It was a reggaeton concert at the Super Bowl.

We have become so accustomed to politicizing everything that we cannot do simple things like watch a concert anymore.

We have turned culture into a warzone by making music and art political playing cards.

There were two Super Bowl halftime shows because the two sides of the culture war can no longer hear the same music.

Literally.

(Kid Rock performed a separate halftime show for Turning Point USA)

But beneath the silliness of this whole thing lies a deeply unsettling truth: the culture war has made us uncultured.

A cultured individual knows how to enjoy and appreciate art.

A politicized individual can only appreciate art that serves his political purpose.

Being unable to appreciate music because of the politics surrounding it is not the cultural flex that many seem to think it is.

It shows a smallness of character, an inability to understand the depth and breadth of human experience.

But the opposite is also true.

Fawning over a performance simply because of the identity of the artist is no more cultured than rejecting the artist because of their identity.

The people who mock the right for rejecting Bad Bunny are the same people who reject Israeli artists and boycott their work.

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They are two sides of the same coin. Both have traded culture for politics; both lack respect for art and culture.

The politicization of art reflects a deeper spiritual crisis. Our worlds are shrinking into our political identities.

Soon, there will be nothing left but politics.

No art, no literature, no music – just the bitter fruit of our political obsessions.

But there is another way.

Instead of identity, we can focus on actions.

Identity politics has dominated American life for decades, and it has done nothing good for anybody.

Because it’s a faulty proposition.

At the end of the day, your identity doesn’t matter – it’s what you do with your identity that counts.

Individuals make things happen in the world, not identities.

Our identity-obsession has deprived us of the ability to think clearly and critically about things. It has made our world small and bitter.

But the world is big and beautiful. It’s filled with all kinds of individuals doing all kinds of wonderful things, people who are defined by what they do, not who they are.

It is time to move past the culture war, to move away from identity politics, to move towards a worldview that prioritizes individual actions over collective identities.

We live in a world of individuals, not identities.

We have lost sight of that in recent decades, but it is never too late to return.

The culture war has taken over our lives; let’s take them back.

Let’s grow out of our petty and childish identity politics and develop a more mature sense of what it means to be an individual.

Life is better when you live it for yourself.

We were all born with certain identities we can’t change.

But we can change how we act. We can change how we live and behave in this world.

Let’s judge people based on the quality of their actions and not the identities they hold.

Let’s evaluate concerts by the quality of the performance and not the politics surrounding it.

That’s the world I want to live in, and I hope you’ll join me.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai.

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It’s hard to be a Chargers fan.

Every year, no matter what, the Chargers find a way to break your heart.

The Chargers are one of the losing-est teams in football.

In their 66 seasons, the Chargers have made it to the Super Bowl once, only to get absolutely demolished.

In my lifetime, the Chargers have done nothing but build good teams and get demolished in the playoffs.

It’s also hard to be a Zionist.

To be a Zionist is to believe that the Jewish people will escape from exile, that we will return to our homeland triumphantly, and that we will live to see an end to the millennia of Jewish oppression.

Our franchise has spent the vast majority of our 3000-some-odd seasons in the proverbial toilet.

Egyptian slavery, Babylonian captivity, Greek oppression, Roman genocide, Muslim dhimmitude, Christian libels, Spanish Inquisition, Russian pogroms, German annihilation, and Palestinian terrorism.

The history of this franchise has not been good.

A weaker fanbase would have given up a long time ago.

They would have thrown away their team-gear and joined up with whatever team was on the rise at the time.

In fact, many Jews have done that.

Some through conversion, some through intermarriage, and some through assimilation.

But the true Zionist fans have never abandoned this team, no matter how bad things looked.

Theodore Herzl watched the Dreyfus Affair with his own two eyes and said, “we can still win this game.”

Menachem Begin survived the Holocaust in the Gulag, and the first thing he did when he got out was to go to Israel and start training.

Holocaust survivors left the Displaced Persons camps, got off the boat in Tel Aviv, and asked for a rifle before they could even speak Hebrew.

Last night’s Chargers game was an absolute disgrace.

Simply the worst game of football I have ever seen.

It was heartbreaking. Simply heartbreaking.

But, in our 66 seasons as a franchise, we have gone through far worse.

It’s a bad time to be a Chargers fan, but it’s always been a bad time to be a Chargers fan.

It’s also a bad time to be a Zionist.

But that’s nothing new.

Zionism is an ideology of faith. A reasonable person would bet against the Zionists. A rational thinker would look at our history and say, there is no way the Jews could ever actually escape from the chains of exile. There’s just no way.

But we’re believers.

We believe in the possibility that next season will be better, even though we have no evidence to support that.

We operate on faith alone.

I am a Zionist and a Chargers fan – these past few years have been absolutely brutal, on both fronts.

But I believe.

I believe that the Jewish people will escape from exile. I believe that we will re-establish ourselves with true sovereignty in our homeland. And I believe that the Chargers will win a Super Bowl in my lifetime.

And I believe, with a perfect faith, in the coming of Moshiach.

After last night, it really seems like the only thing that could possibly bring the Chargers back to the Super Bowl is Moshiach.

But I’m a believer.

It’s hard to believe, but we do it anyway.

Last night, I watched our quarterback get sacked, over and over again.

But he kept getting up. He kept pulling himself off the turf and walking back into the huddle to do it all over again.

It was not fun to watch, but it was inspiring.

How many times will a man get hit before he just lays down and refuses to get up again?

I don’t know.

I’m a Zionist, and a Chargers fan – I only know what it’s like to get hit and to get back up again.

It’s been a tough few years, and it will probably be another tough few years, but it’s always been tough for us.

And all of that suffering has only made us tougher.

So, for the Chargers, there’s always next season.

Another season to get excited, to build up our hope, and to have our hopes dashed in the playoffs.

And then there will be another season after that to do the same.

But, eventually, we will win.

Why?

Simply because we believe.

We believe in the Chargers, we believe in Israel, and we believe in faith itself.

It’s no fun, but it’s what we do.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

(And Go Bolts)

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As always,

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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And, as always,

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

~

If you liked this episode, please consider subscribing to and sharing The Zionist Voice with your friends. In these days of moral darkness, we need strong voices of moral clarity, now more than ever. Thank you for your support.

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There is no room for a Jew in a war between radical Marxists and Neo-nazis.

That was my first thought watching One Battle after Another.

The film tells the story of a radical group of leftist revolutionaries, The French 75, and the white supremacist who is hell-bent on catching and destroying the organization’s leadership.

The movie is highly entertaining, with lots of laughs and excitement, and I highly recommend it.

Like everything made these days, the film is too long. The plot drags at times and gets overly involved in itself, but it is still one of the better movies you will see this year, even if it is not one of Anderson’s best.

However, beneath the surface lies a much deeper story about political violence and those who justify it.

A Brief History Lesson

The most important film you’ve probably never seen is The Battle of Algiers (1966). It is an Italian-Algerian film that tells the story of Ali La Pointe, leader of the FLN, the radical nationalist organization that led the resistance against the French colonial authority, and the colonial police who are determined to catch La Pointe at all costs.

Understanding The Battle of Algiers is essential to understanding how Anderson frames his revolutionaries, and how those revolutionaries resemble the would-be revolutionaries of today.

It is the epitome of a resistance film and a must-watch for any anticolonial film studies major, and the influence on One Battle after Another could not be clearer.

The two sides in The Battle of Algiers could not be more clear: black native Algerian resistance fighter vs. white colonial French tyrant. The same is true in Anderson’s film, with the beautiful and brave Teyanna Taylor squaring off against the lock-jawed WASP drill sergeant played by Sean Penn.

If you want to understand the relationship between radical Islamism and radical Marxism, you need to understand the Algerian Revolution.

The Algerian Revolution brought radical French leftists and radical Islamic nationalists together.

Writers like Foucault, Fanon, and Sartre all wrote about the heroism and the humanity of revolution.

They cared more about the fulfillment of their ideas than the lives that would be lost.

Fanon, the most vocal, wrote:

“And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary… The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.”

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

(Still of FLN fighters from The Battle of Algiers.)

The Battle of Algiers, both the historical event and the movie, gave rise to a new kind of man, a kind of man that the radical European mind became obsessed with: the uncompromising anti-colonial radical.

And that man is sexy.

Just wait until you see everyone dressed up as “Bob” (Leo’s character) on Halloween. Or ask any of Luigi Mangione’s fan girls.

In a world with fewer and fewer male role models, the man who is willing to dedicate his entire life to the violent pursuit of his cause has tremendous sex appeal.

As you watch the film, the appeal of the revolutionary grows within you, especially as you see the righteousness of their cause and the stupidity of their enemy’s cause.

There is something tremendously appealing about revolution and violence, especially for young people.

But what happens when revolution becomes the only moral language left — and Jews don’t fit the script?

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Revolutionaries and Israel

Since the Battle of Algiers and the eponymous film, the revolutionary has remained a mainstay in the cultural zeitgeist, even as colonialism collapsed all around the world.

Except, according to the post-colonial left, for Israel – they believe Israel is the last colonial country remaining.

And so, for anyone who is cut from the same cloth as Ali La Pointe or Angela Davis, Israel becomes the final frontier in the eternal war against Colonialism.

Israel and Jews are never mentioned in the film, which was a huge breath of relief. The film exclusively deals with immigration related issues. In the world of the movie, those two issues have nothing in common.

But, in the world of today, they do.

Virtually all radical leftist movements are virulently antizionist. While Israel has absolutely nothing to do with ICE, there are still organizations like La Raza por Gaza that do everything they can to bring those two issues together in people’s minds, or people like Zohran Mamdani, who believe NYPD violence is caused and inspired by IDF.

“When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF!” (Zohran Mamdani, September 2023)

(An image published by Within Our Lifetime on November 16, 2023 demonstrating the location of Zionist organizations to target.)

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Since everyone wants to be a revolutionary, and the revolution is anti-Israel, you must be an antizionist to be a revolutionary, it is that simple.

Sadly, I know a lot of people, kids really, who threw away their Jewish identity for their revolutionary identity.

In 2025, one of those identities has sex appeal, and one of them doesn’t.

One Battle After Another has its finger on the pulse of American political bitterness. Membership in radical organizations and participation in political violence is way up on the left, and membership in white nationalist groups and participation in political violence are way up on the right too.

We, the Jewish people, as always, are stuck in the middle.

You will never be revolutionary enough to make people forget you’re a Jew.

Just ask Leon Trotsky.

1968 Reprise

Teyana Taylor’s character, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is a young revolutionary raised by revolutionaries. She is the living embodiment of the revolution.

(Still of Perfidia Beverly Hills from One Battle after Another.)

After her initial revolutionary forays, she is apprehended, but she eventually manages to escape.

In many ways, her character resembles Assata Shakur, the black revolutionary who killed a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973, but she escaped from prison in 1979 and lived out the rest of her life in Cuba.

She died less than a month ago, on September 25, 2025.

Assata Shakur was the last major revolutionary figure from the radical black power movement of the 1960s.

Like the other revolutionaries of that era, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and Kathleen Cleaver, to name a few, she carries an incredible amount of cultural significance.

If her name sounds familiar, that might be because she was godmother to the world-renowned Tupac Shakur.

One of the ideas played with in the film is the generational transmission of the revolution from mother to daughter.

While the revolutionary fervor of 1968 and the years that followed died off, there was still a reservoir of revolutionary passion in the families that carried it.

And, of course, in the universities whose professors never abandoned their dreams.

The world of 2025 has been looking eerily similar to 1968. There has been mass political unrest, university chaos, building seizures, and political assassinations.

This film may give us some insight into why that is.

The Revolution This Time

The revolution of the 1960s failed, and the revolutionaries of the 1970s and 80s went into hiding, but their ideas never disappeared.

The ideas of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary violence, first expressed by the New French Left and later appropriated and adapted by black radicals, were perhaps best expressed by the revolution’s only begotten child, Tupac Shakur.

Tupac is misunderstood by almost everyone, and I am certainly no more capable of understanding him than anyone else. But two things about Tupac are undeniable: his literary skill and cultural influence were second to none.

(Tupac Shakur)

If one is to understand our current cultural climate, one must understand rap music, and if one is to understand rap music, one must understand the genius of Tupac Shakur.

Tupac used lyrical storytelling to portray people, long despised by society, in their humanity and in their grace. His music brings empathy to the prostitute, compassion to the single mother, and understanding to the thug. One does not have to like his music to recognize the magnitude of its impact.

His music was violent, and one certainly would not be wrong to say he glorified violence. The picture he painted of himself was a variation of the warrior poet. And all of us poets dream of being the warrior poet because the warrior poet is the living embodiment of his passion. But Tupac was something more. Tupac was the thug poet, the pirate poet – the revolutionary poet.

Unfortunately, most rappers lack the skill and nuance of Tupac, so much of the rap that has followed has glorified violence for violence’s sake, but Tupac was sincere, and his sincerity allowed many people to relate to these struggles even though they had nothing in common with them.

These are the first two verses of “Dear Mama,” one of Tupac’s most revolutionary songs. In it, he expresses gratitude, pain, guilt, anger, self-justification, and much more.

Excerpt from “Dear Mama” by Tupac Shakur

When I was young, me and my mama had beef /

Seventeen years old, kicked out on the streets …

And even as a crack fiend, Mama /

You always was a black queen, Mama /

I finally understand …

There’s no way I can pay you back /

But the plan is to show you that I understand /

You are appreciated.

Verse 2 is an especially powerful expression of the pain of growing up fatherless, the experience of brotherhood in a gang, and the ultimate justification of violence due to necessity.

(Tupac and his mother, Afeni Shakur).

Or, as Lenin would say, the ends justify the means.

If Assata Shakur was the last radical of her generation, then perhaps Tupac was the first of his.

Tupac was weaned on revolution, and he gave birth to a whole new kind of consciousness, a rap consciousness, that glorified and justified violence. Meaning, the people who listen to Tupac, and the people who listen to artists who were influenced by Tupac, develop a new attitude and relationship with violence. Where most people despise violence by nature, one who has been acculturated in the rap world may have a very different relationship with the idea of violence.

This is not to say that all rap music promotes violence or that rap music is inherently violent by nature. You would be hard pressed to find a bigger defender of rap music than I, but, as a major consumer of rap music, I am well aware of the kind of consciousness it cultivates in its listeners.

It is a kind of quasi-revolutionary consciousness – the truly revolutionary consciousness only justifies violence insofar as it supports the revolution, but, because the rap consciousness posits an eternal oppressor-oppressed dynamic, far more violence is justified because even random acts of violence, like robbery and murder, are seen as anti-establishment and therefore beneficial.

Of course, most people who have been influenced by this music are passive fans, and, whatever the music says, they are still averse to violence.

But what happens when that quasi-revolutionary consciousness meets emotionally extreme political unrest?

What happens when a generation of people with this rap consciousness start seeing their friends’ parents getting abducted by ICE agents? What happens when they start seeing national guard officers in the street? What happens when they are bombarded with footage from Gaza telling them Israel is annihilating babies with laser beams?

In the words of the bomb man, “boom.”

When this quasi-revolutionary consciousness mixes with political unrest spread virally on social media, dangerous things start to happen.

The film is discomfortingly prescient in that way. While not explicitly about any of the actual events of the past five years, we can see the similarities plainly. Political violence is on the rise. When one sees cities with masked protestors and riot police, it is hard to not think of 2020. When one sees unhooded Klansmen, it is hard not to think of 2021. When one sees college kids smashing up buildings, it is hard not to think of 2024.

Let us hope that this is wrong, but the film does seem like an omen for what is to come. Once upon a time, I might have looked forward to that as I had my own revolutionary aspirations.

But, like Trotsky, I have learned: there is no room in the revolution for a Jew.

(Leon Trotsky and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Two of the most brilliant Jewish minds to come out of Tsarist Russia. One was a communist revolutionary, and one was a Zionist revolutionary.)

(A note in closing: In 2025, the feeling of Jewish homelessness is no longer theoretical. We are watching the political extremes grow louder and more violent, each claiming moral purity even as they court bloodshed. And once again, Jews find ourselves with no camp that wants us, no revolution willing to make room for us, no assurance that political chaos will not land on our doorstep. This film is not prophecy, but it is a warning: when the world divides into the righteous and the damned, the Jew is always asked to choose a side that will never choose him back.)

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai.

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Listen to two Gen Z poets discuss the state of our generation, our literature, and our society as a whole.

Happy Thanksgiving,

And, As Always,

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

~

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Today we are releasing our first podcast episode. Originally, we had planned to debut “This Way Up” in January, but due to the major political changes that have taken place this week, we have decided to rush production to get this episode out.

Please forgive the lack of music and transitions and any other audio issues there may be, this is our first time with video and audio content, and there is a steep learning curve.

We would especially like to thank all of our paying subscribers — without your financial support, this never could have happened.

If you would like to continue to support us, please consider upgrading your subscription and sharing our work on social media.

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It is not easy to be a Zionist these days, and we are incredibly grateful for your constant support.

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Am Yisrael Chai

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Editor’s Note: This piece has been in production since September 10, 2025. We are publishing it now in response to the Nick Fuentes/Tucker Carlson interview.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I have apparently become a ‘radical antisemitic Christian Nationalist.’

At least, that’s what Facebook thinks.

To be clear: I did not adopt these views; the platforms just assumed I did and then just kept feeding them to me.

For the past month and a half, I have gone undercover to learn how right-wing antisemitic conspiracies spread on the internet so you don’t have to.

In this pursuit, I have seen dozens of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson clips.

Their interview this week was the obvious conclusion of everything that has been happening on this side of the internet in the past 6 weeks.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination did not just shock the conservative world — it detonated a conspiratorial ecosystem that had been waiting for a catalyst.

Within hours, far-right channels began laundering old antisemitic narratives through new language: “noticing,” “just asking questions,” and “Zionist betrayal.”

These channels had been gathering fuel for their antizionist narrative for a long time, and Kirk’s death was the spark they needed to blow the lid off of the conservative world.

The Nick Fuentes–Tucker Carlson interview is not the beginning of this new antisemitism; it is the culmination of years of grooming and cultivating an audience for it.

The conspiratorial energy that surged after Kirk’s death needed a public outlet, and no one is better at taking advantage of doubt than Tucker Carlson.

Every trope, every coded phrase, every “question” that circulated after Kirk’s killing has now been mainstreamed by one of the most influential media figures on the American right.

Fuentes was beyond the pale before Kirk’s assassination; now, he is being platformed by Carlson and has found himself, after nearly 10 years in the wilderness, finally coming into the light.

Carlson has now legitimized Fuentes. The fringest of the fringe has now moved into the right-wing spotlight.

This is no longer fringe rhetoric online. The silence in response is a clear invitation to all right-wing antisemites to speak their minds and ‘defend their truths,’ as the woke antisemites would say.

Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, one of the leading conservative think tanks, responded to the interview by saying:

“We will always defend truth, we will always defend America and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and, as I have said before, always will be, a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Roberts also remarked conservatives should refrain from “cancelling” Fuentes.

This is the same Heritage Foundation that was behind Project Esther, which was a program to allegedly combat antisemitism post-10/7.

Perhaps Fuentes and Carlson can partner up on that too.

For years now, we have seen antisemitism sweep through the left, leaving nothing untouched. Today, we have seen that same antisemitism, the one that calls itself ‘antizionist,’ burst forth from the right.

People who remember David Duke and the antisemites of the Ku Klux Klan might assume that Carlson and Fuentes are just modern adaptations of those older beliefs, but they are not.

They are a new breed of antisemite, and we must understand how this new antisemitism operates to understand why it has gained so much popularity in the past six weeks.

The Right-Wing Antisemitic Pipeline

There are five basic stages in the right-wing antisemitic pipeline: Questioning, Noticing, Revision, Acceptance, and Radicalization.

This pipeline works so effectively that you can go through all five stages, going from a philosemite to a Groyper (follower of Nick Fuentes) in an afternoon of doomscrolling.

Using my experience this past week, I will take you through a journey to the bottom of the internet.

However, a caveat is in order – this is an exploration of the antisemitic conspiracies that flooded the internet following Charlie Kirk’s death – this is in no way a reflection on Kirk, his work, his relationship with the Jewish people, or anything of the sort. The tragedy of his death and the meaning of his life are being manipulated for political purposes left and right – this is an exploration of one of those forms of manipulation.

Questioning:

The top of the neo-nazi train leaves the station with a question.

Why does Israel fight so many wars? Why are so many film executives Jewish? Why did Charlie Kirk start to criticize Israel a month before he dies?

Whatever the initial question is, it presents itself harmlessly.

This is the first stop, and this is where most people get off. All of these questions can be explained reasonably, and most people will hear them and move on.

Or, one stays on the train and goes to the next stop.

I began seeing videos of Charlie Kirk expressing frustration with Israel and her supporters.

Then, I started seeing videos of him talking to Megyn Kelly about how his Zionist supporters had turned on him following his criticism.

Finally, the content I was seeing started to ask a simple question – did I notice anything?

Noticing:

(Screenshot from the comments from a facebook post. The original post is implying that the U.S. went to war with all of those countries on behalf of Jewish banking interests. )

Noticing is the most important stage in the neo-nazi pipeline.

So important, that the group of people who make and spread this content call themselves “Noticers.”

A “noticer” is someone who has begun to recognize or “notice” the presence of Jews in every bad element of society.

Have you noticed that Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein both have Hebraic names?

Have you noticed that George Soros has funded most of the organizations like Black Lives Matter and the Jewish Voice for Peace?

Or, my personal favorite, have you noticed that every American president has kissed the Western Wall… except JFK…

Have you noticed that?

The importance and the danger of this step cannot be overstated.

“Noticing” appears completely harmless, and it can be mentioned without any implication of antisemitism.

Unlike the new breed of left-wing antisemites, right-wing antisemites are completely comfortable being called antisemitic, they take great pride in it.

However, many of the left-wing social justice antisemites are fundamentally uncomfortable being called antisemitic, so they need to have enough plausible deniability to convince themselves that they are not antisemitic.

“Noticing” gives them exactly that.

It allows them to sit on the fence and consume as much antisemitic content as possible without having to identify as antisemitic.

That is why we have this new unholy alliance between the neo-nazis and cultural Marxists who both assume that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Israel.

And, since the connection between Israel and the assassination is purely based on “noticing,” it cannot be disproven by the reality of the shooter.

They say, “we simply ‘noticed’ a connection between Israel and Kirk’s death – we never said they were connected, only that we noticed that there was something fishy going on.

This is also where a lot of people spreading antisemitism retreat to defend themselves – by only pointing out things they “notice,” they claim that they aren’t hurting anyone and that they’re only “asking questions.”

Revision:

Most people stay at the noticing stage. They can stay there retaining as many antisemitic notions as they want without jeopardizing their righteous image of themselves.

However, for the people who go one step further, they enter the stage of “revision,” the stage where they start to take all of the things they have noticed and put them together as they craft a new understanding of history based on their noticings.

Have you “noticed” that without the horrors of the Holocaust, there would be no case for the existence of Israel?

And have you “noticed” that the doors to the gas chambers opened both directions?

And have you “noticed” that the Jews were kicked out of every country they ever went… maybe they’re the common denominator?

The revision then comes and says that the Holocaust and World War II was a whole psyop for Jewish power and Zionist imperialism.

After questioning the status quo, I started to notice that things in the present were not exactly what they seemed – then, I started to notice that things in the past were not what they seemed, so I revised my understanding of history.

And now, I am ready to accept the truth – the Jews are the problem.

Acceptance:

“I might not get a second date, but at least she knows why coins have ridges.”

This is a very popular meme on the far right.

In order to understand it, one must know the theory that coins have ridges because the Jews used to counterfeit coins in the past or something – I am not quite sure.

The whole premise of the meme is, I went on a date, and I spent the whole time sharing my antisemitic conspiracies – and I am proud of that.

Because they are.

They are proud of themselves for finally choosing truth over vanity.

At least, that is how they see themselves.

Once they have accepted the theory enough to bring it up on dates, they are radical enough to start preaching the antisemitic gospel themselves.

Radicalization: From Charlie to Nick

(Facebook story complaining about the Jewish influence over Trump. The Juice box emoji means “Jews.”)

Once one has become radical enough to accept all of these things, which can take less than an hour from start to finish, they are ready for Nick Fuentes – the final boss of right-wing Jew hatred.

Nick Fuentes is perhaps the leading voice in antisemitism on the right, and he is about to become one of the most influential voices in American politics.

Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes had a lot in common in their critique of wokism and their use of podcasting and debating.

However, as the followers of Fuentes are quick to point out, Charlie was “the nice guy” of conservatism.

And they’re right.

While so many people are trying to cast Charlie Kirk as this great demagogue and saber-rattler, his rhetoric was nothing compared to people like Nick Fuentes.

I expect that Fuentes’ following will double in the coming months, and that he will get a tremendous amount of support from the misogynistic Marxist Bernie bros. (I wrote this weeks ago, and today’s interview only confirms his ascent.)

One of my great concerns following this tragedy has been that there is nothing left that unites the right and the left in this country, nothing besides their shared wariness of the Jewish people.

We cannot afford to stay on the sidelines in this fight anymore. The new antisemitic conspiracy is here, and it is stronger than ever.

Millions of people are watching this content every day – we need to start producing powerful content of our own.

To that end, the Zionist Voice will be releasing a podcast soon and getting on TikTok, but we need help.

We wanted Qatar to fund this project, but they refused, for some reason, so we need your financial support.

Subscribe now

The sooner we raise the money, the sooner we can fight back.

Please consider supporting our efforts by upgrading to a paid subscription or making a contribution on Patreon.

Thank you again for your continued support of Zionist Art.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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(Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, better known as Rashi, the great biblical commentator and illuminator.)

What if we’ve been thinking about this all wrong?

What if we’ve been fighting pernicious anti-Jewish lies for so long that we actually lost the thread?

What if antizionism is not antisemitism – what if we got it backwards?

Last week, we began the yearly Torah reading cycle anew, and, on the very first page, on the very first line, there is a comment from Rashi, the great 11th century Torah commentator, that should give us all pause.

In the margins besides the words “in the beginning,” Rashi writes:

“IN THE BEGINNING — Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah, which is the Law book of Israel, should have commenced with the verse (Exodus 12:2) “This month shall be unto you the first of the months” which is the first commandment given to Israel. What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the Creation? Because of the thought expressed in the text (Psalms 111:6) “He declared to His people the strength of His works (i.e. He gave an account of the work of Creation), in order that He might give them the heritage of the nations.” For should the peoples of the world say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan”, Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed, He gave it to them, and when He willed, He took it from them and gave it to us.”

Had he written this last year, it would still have been profound, but he wrote it over 900 years ago… 800 years before the State of Israel would even be founded.

What did Rashi understand that we don’t? How was he able to see so far into the future that he could predict the arguments of modern antizionists better than we can?

For context, Rashi lived from 1040-1105. Those were certainly interesting times, both in his native France and in Europe broadly.

He was 26 years old when William the Bastard conquered England, and he was 55 when Pope Urban II declared the first crusade to liberate the holy land.

Rashi himself knew the crusades intimately. The stories vary, but there are many legends about why Rashi and his community were saved from that crusade.

The other Jews of Europe, however, were not.

We rarely think of Rashi as a historical observer, but perhaps we should if we are to understand how he could have anticipated antizionism.

As a Jew, Rashi might have understood the history leading up to the crusades as follows.

1. In 70 CE, Rome exiles the Jews.

2. In 380 CE, Rome adopts Christianity, making the Holy Land Christian.

3. In 638 CE, the forces of Islam capture the Holy Land, making it Muslim.

4. In 1095 CE, the forces of Christianity invade the Holy Land in order to return the land to… its Christian roots.

(Map of the First Crusade. The crusaders murdered 25,000 Jews from the great Jewish communities of Speyers, Worms and Mainz on their way to liberate the Holy Land)

Rashi was 55 years old when the Crusades began. He had spent 55 years of his life mourning the destruction of the Jewish Temple, fasting for one day in each of those years to remember the sorrow and the anguish the Jews felt when our Temple was destroyed and we were sent out of our Holy Land.

And then, in his 56th year, when the Crusades began, he would have seen these men, marching to that same Holy Land, ostensibly to liberate it, riding into Jewish communities and massacring their inhabitants.

In their desperation to liberate the Jewish Holy Land, the Crusaders liberated many Jews from their lives.

But why? Why kill all of these Jews who haven’t been to the Holy Land in centuries?

The traditional answer has always been antisemitism, more or less.

The Christians hated their Jewish neighbors and the Crusades were as good an opportunity as any to get rid of them.

But maybe not. Maybe there is a more sinister connection between the ideology of the Crusade and anti-Jewish violence that Rashi alludes to. Maybe Rashi’s experience with the Crusades gave him insight into the mind of the Crusading Jew Hater.

According to Rashi (quoting Rabbi Isaac), the nations of the world call us “robbers,” because we stole the land from the 7 nations of Canaan, but that’s not exactly the truth.

They do call us robbers, for sure, and they do say that we stole the land, absolutely – but no one ever cites the Canaanites.

There is no “Nakba Day” for the Hittites and the Perizzites, and no one talks about the cultural erasure of the Jebusite identity. And the Amorites? They get no play in today’s world of virtue signaling. People care less about the Canaanite nations than they do about the actual genocides happening in the world today.

So what is Rashi doing here?

I must confess – I have been a little bit dishonest with you.

This teaching does not come from Rashi; it comes from Rabbi Isaac, who Rashi is quoting.

However, our chronology still works, because Rabbi Isaac was Rashi’s father.

So, when we read this line, we should imagine Rashi not as the teacher, as we usually do, but as the student.

For whatever reason, I have always imagined that this teaching happened like this:

A bearded man and his son are sitting in the house of study, learning this parasha together.

A few Christians come by and sneer, “look at the Jews, studying a book they think was promised to them, learning laws for a land they think was promised to them, pretending they’re so much better than us. Doesn’t that book say what we already know, that you stole that land? You stole that land like you steal everything, because you’re all greedy Jewish thieves.”

The bearded man, with recourse to nothing but wisdom, looks at his young son and says,

“You see? That is why the Torah begins right here, with the creation of the world. It should have started with the first law, so why start here with creation? Because people like that will always come to us and say things like this. They always have, and they always will.

But we know – G-d created the whole world, and He decides who gets what. We lived in Israel once, and we will live there again, because G-d has always kept His covenant with us.”

At the time when Rashi learned this from his father, the nations of the world were confident in their ridicule.

The Jews had been exiled for 900 years – who would seriously believe that G-d was still keeping faith with the Jews?

When Rashi learned this from his father, the nations of the world were confident in their ridicule. The exile would have been proof positive that our covenant was broken and our relationship to the land void.

But our enemies, according to Rabbi Isaac and Rashi, do not claim that our covenant was broken – they claim that we never had one to begin with.

But why? Why make such a big deal about how the Jews got the land anyways? It is not as though the medieval nations of Europe were opposed to conquest, that was the whole point of the crusades to begin with!

Perhaps the answer lies in Rabbi Isaac’s quiet, devastating response:

“Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed He gave it to them, and when He willed He took it from them and gave it to us.””

This answer is remarkable.

Firstly, it accepts exile, not as an evil imposed on the Jewish people by others, but as a condition that was divinely approved. Living at such a precarious time for the Jewish people, this answer reflects the tremendous depth of the Jewish character – we accept our exile.

We could just as easily point the finger at the Romans, or the Arabs, or the Crusaders, or the Ottomans, or the British, and we could say, “Robbers! You are all robbers! You have stolen our land from us!”

But we don’t.

We accept our exile as a condition of G-d’s plan. We did that in 1948, Rashi and his father did it in 1100 — and we still do it today.

But in our acceptance is hope, and in our hope, there is prophecy.

This response is prophetic – it predicts our return to the land of Israel 800 years before it happens.

Rashi and his father lived at the midpoint of Jewish exile — nine centuries after the Temple’s fall, nine before the State’s rebirth.

But even if that was not prophetic enough – they go on to predict the exact nature of the antizionist critique – land theft.

(Graphics displaying our robbery of the land.)

(Protests against our ownership of the land outside of a synagogue in Canada.)

(The modern version of what Rashi anticipated. There are whole organizations, like Visualizing Palestine, that are dedicated to creating graphics that show ‘this land theft.’)

Most people believe that modern antizionism is a response to modern Zionism, as the names would imply.

But what if that’s not quite right?

What if antizionism is actually as old as the Crusades, if not older?

If we are to proceed, we need a definition of antizionism. I think this one will do:

Antizionism is an ancient and obsessive impulse to deny that Jews have any meaningful connection to the Land of Israel.

If we are to understand the dynamics of antizionism, which has quickly become one of the major ideological movements of our day, we need to broaden our conception of why so many people, and so many Europeans especially, obsess over Jews and Israel.

We must look at Rashi’s wisdom and consider what the medieval crusaders of his day have in common with the modern antizionists of our own.

According to Rashi, the peoples of the world look at us and say, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan.”

Our initial assumption was that the peoples of the world want Israel to deny this claim and say, “no! We are not robbers, we did not steal the land…”

But what if we are reading that wrong too?

What if the world expects us to brag? What if they expect us to say:

“Yes! We are robbers! We took the lands of the seven nations of Canaan by force, and we are damn proud of it. Here are the names of the brilliant burglars who helped us steal the land.”

After all, the Crusades are only 30 years after the Norman conquest (robbery) of England, a moment in which William the Conqueror sailed from Normandy, invaded England, executed 90% of the native nobility, and established an occupation government that has remained there ever since.

The Normans are still tremendously revered today, and they are revered precisely because of their conquest and theft.

He is “William the Conqueror” not “William who Had a Legitimate Claim ordained by G-d” – and he is revered for it.

And the biggest irony is that the Normans were not even native to Normandy.

The word “Norman” comes from “Norseman” because, originally, the Normans were Vikings who came down and conquered Normandy, gaining official recognition of their conquest in 911 C.E.

Historical memory about land stealing is so short that within 150 years of their conquest of Normandy, everyone had forgotten that they were originally Vikings.

Normandy is still named after the Vikings who stole the land from the natives, and the English nobility is still ruled by their descendants, but no one calls them robbers.

Robbery, specifically land theft, is the way of the world.

In fact, the only nation that has some claim to their land that is not rooted in land theft is Israel.

Our claim, as Rashi explains, is fundamentally religious. G-d made the heavens and the earth, and He decides who gets what.

In the 11th century, he decided that the Holy Land should be ruled by Muslim conquerors. For a few years between 1095 and 1400, He decided it should be ruled by Christians. Between 1500 and 1917, He gave it to the Ottomans, and, after that, to the British.

In 1948, He chose to give it back to us, and He could change His mind at any time, because the whole world belongs to Him.

If we are in the land, according to our argument, it is not due to military conquest – it is due to Him.

The answer is as simple as it is beautiful.

But it’s also infuriating.

There is nothing more infuriating than someone who has made peace with their situation and takes responsibility for it.

This is the quiet confidence of Zionism.

Our conviction that G-d promised us that land is absolute, so the vicissitudes of history are irrelevant – we’ll be there when we’re meant to be there.

And this confidence goes back to Rashi and long before him.

It is a confidence that comes, ironically, from having a relationship with the land rooted in something other than conquest. There is something about Jews and the 8500 square miles of Israel that is inseparable.

Zionism is that connection.

Zionism is this wholly unnatural belief that the Jewish people’s connection to the land goes beyond conquest; that is why the attack against us is always the same.

In Rashi’s day, the attack was meant to shame us for having lost the land we claim was promised to us by G-d.

Because if G-d did promise it to us, then it was not stolen. If He did not promise it to us, we are robbers.

But, if He did promise it to us, we would not have been exiled, so, therefore, we must be robbers.

Which would make us like everyone else – except that we are the only people who do not relish the title of conqueror.

There is no “Joshua the Conqueror” or “David the Great” in Jewish culture. Our heroes are revered for other things, like Rashi, who is remembered for his scholarship.

In this one gloss on one line of Torah, Rashi explains 1800 years of antizionism, from the Christian Romans to the modern SJP.

For 2000 years, the shame of our exile denied the legitimacy of our claim.

But when the Jews returned to the land, and built a community, and then an army, and then a state, all of the sudden, Rashi and his father were vindicated.

Zionism, the basic understanding of Jews’ historical connection to Israel, is the manifestation of G-d’s eternal covenant with the Jewish people.

Our connection to the land, for the 2000 years we were waiting to return, fulfilled our contractual obligation, and our return to the land fulfilled G-d’s.

In these past 2000 years, people like Rashi and his father have kept faith with our divine connection to the land, even when there was no reasonable hope of return.

We always associate the Zionist dream with Theodore Herzl, but maybe we need to start expanding our view.

Because the Zionist dream is at least as old as Rashi’s father. And, if I’m being honest, I think the Zionist dream probably goes all the way back to Moses, but that we’ll have to save for another essay.

(Yom Kippur 1967)

~

As always,

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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We were like those who dream”

— Psalm 126

(The Return of the Exiles of Zion, William Brassey Hole)

Waking from a dream can be disorienting.

It has been a week since the hostages came home, a week of strange emotions.

Elation for those who returned, anger for those who did not, fear for whatever is to come – those are but faint echoes of the pangs of the Jewish heart.

A heart filled with emotions like these sometimes wrests control away from the mind.

When working with young kids, they sometimes have “Big Emotions” – emotions they can neither handle nor understand, emotions bigger than their little bodies. And this has been a week of big emotions all around.

When a child has a big emotion, you put a hand on their shoulder and tell them to let it out. You take your time with them, and you make sure that they feel safe.

But the Jewish people will have no time to process these feelings.

Because, as much as this feels like waking from a dream, it’s not. As much as we might like to savor this brief moment of happiness, to bask in a moment of light amid years of darkness, we cannot.

When you awake from a dream, the world is still as it was before.

But our world is nothing like it was before.

These past two years have not been a dream; they’ve been more like a blackout bender – one where you awake to find yourself with a ringing headache and broken furniture.

Except we have been harrowingly sober this whole time.

This has been more like inviting a friend over, they get blackout drunk, invite all of their antisemitic friends, trash the place, break all the furniture, and then, in the morning, they wake up on top of their wreckage, yawn, and ask: “So what’s for breakfast?”

Whatever connection there was between the Jewish nation and the nations of the world has been severed, and it is hard to know if it will ever be repaired.

In the same week that our beloved friends were set free, Israeli fans were banned from a soccer match in the U.K.

Maccabi Tel Aviv was set to play Aston Villa in the Europa League Cup at Villa Park in the U.K., but, due to safety concerns, the city of Birmingham has decided to ban Maccabi fans from attending.

Allegedly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government are ‘outraged’ by this. They say they are trying to reverse the decision.

But no one is stating the obvious: the city is probably right.

With everything going on in the U.K. right now, it realistically isn’t safe for Jews and Israelis to openly attend soccer matches in England.

A Jew or two could go to a game if he wore a cap over his kippah, but any open display of Jewishness is certainly out of the question.

It is yet another heartbreaking display of what has happened to England.

If you know anything about the English relationship with soccer and sporting culture in general, you understand how serious this is: the English are renowned for their love of soccer and sport.

Forget the obvious moral problems – think about the cultural implications.

Or focus on the fact that all of this is being done out of fear of their own neighbors, and no one is willing to say it.

Or consider what a slap in the face this is to British Jews after the Yom Kippur bombing.

Whatever part of this story outrages you most, that is just one splinter in the mountain of broken devastation that our drunken ‘friends’ left us with.

These drunken ‘friends,’ the nations of the world, have been drunk on their own self-righteousness for two years.

(The Absinthe Drinker, Edouard Manet, 1859)

As they drank deeper from the bowl of their own delusions, they grew bolder, less inhibited, and made decisions, life-changing, irrevocable decisions that will carry consequences for decades to come.

Decisions like rewarding barbarism with statehood and cheering on a flotilla of deluded adolescents as they carried out the barbarians’ will.

But as with all benders, there comes a time to sober up. That time came on October 8th, but the world kept drinking. And that time would come up a dozen more times before the hostages finally came home — but the belligerent world refused to stop, diving deeper into its own illusions.

Keir Starmer is waking to the realization that soccer matches will no longer be safe in England. Today, it’s for the Jews, so realistically no one cares, but it’s only a matter of time before the fear spreads.

Today, it is unsafe to be Jewish. Tomorrow, it will be unsafe to be gay.

Starmer seems to be sobering up to this reality, but you can see how desperately he is thinking about indulging in the simple bliss of blaming our country while ignoring his.

But there is no going back. The nations of the world have made their bed; now they have to lie in it.

After these past two years, with all the destruction wrought in the name of Palestine, there is simply no time to weep for the drunk who ruined his own life, especially when you know he is going back to the bottle.

Israel needs to be rebuilt, but there won’t be a dime in international aid.

Gaza needs to be salted, but there will be billions of dollars in loosely-supervised aid that will surely fund more terrorism.

At the end of this long and destructive bender, it appears that the nations of the world are still nowhere near sober.

They say that addicts must hit rock bottom before they change, and the nations clearly don’t think they’ve hit rock bottom.

Even after the “grooming-gang” scandal, no one spoke of sobering up.

As Jews, we do not have the luxury of inebriation. We’ve had to endure these past two years hauntingly sober, watching as the world partied on – celebrating a two-year Festival of Its Own Self-Righteousness.

The Jews will soon be expelled from Europe, either on paper or in practice, but the writing is on the wall. The Jews in the United States have it better, but only slightly. The fiction of the political parties is fading; the moderate center has evaporated. Neither side of the American political spectrum believes in non-violence, yet they both believe that the Jews are behind all the world’s evils.

This year we had one public firebombing and one public assassination (of Jews); how many will it be next year?

If we cannot admit that this is our current reality, we cannot begin to rebuild.

The old world is broken. It has been shattered to bits. Holding on to the idea that it is coming back will not serve you.

The only way forward is with truth. The hostages are home, but the war is not over – and the work has only just begun.

The good news is that we are in very capable hands: yours.

(The Creation of Adam, Michaelangelo, 1510)

~

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Am Yisrael Chai

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(The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich, 1810)

After celebrating the ancient holiday of Sukkot and the two year anniversary of October 7th, I turned my phone on to learn that, yet again, another batch of artists decided to boycott Israelis.

This time, they banned Israelis from streaming their music on Spotify, effectively making it impossible for most Israelis to listen.

This boycott particularly hurt because of its bitter irony.

One of the bands involved is Paramore, a band I got into after hearing a particularly moving rendition of “Still into You,” at Ballenby, my favorite karaoke bar in Tel Aviv.

That was the first time I encountered Paramore, listening to a young Israeli belt it out in the middle of Tel Aviv, in the middle of a war.

Ballenby was destroyed a few weeks later – it was hit by a hypersonic missile from Iran.

But no missile can kill the music.

At least, that’s what the musicians I grew up on used to say.

There was a time when music was an endeavor of peace, a time when musicians dreamed of uniting people through melody and harmony rather than malice and hate, but that time is over.

As much as these musicians will tell you they’re pro-peace, it is obvious that they are, in fact, just anti-Us.

I say “us” and not Israel because these boycotts are much bigger than Israel. These boycotts hurt millions of young people, most of whom do not live in Israel.

It is not as though Bibi and all of the demonic warlords they imagine fill his cabinet are listening to Paramore and Lorde – these bands are for young people.

The group of people who would probably have been the most affected by these boycotts are the innocent teenagers and young people who were massacred at NOVA.

How many of those kids listened to these artists? How many of the hostages were fans? How many cars had Paramore and Lorde bumper stickers that were torched that day?

This war started with an assault on young people, an assault on peace activists, and an assault on music itself.

And now, the world over, young people, peace activists, and musicians have sided with their own enemy.

Many people would like to believe that all of these people are just stupid. That they have been brainwashed by the internet and their thinking capacity has rotted away to nothing.

But the truth is that antizionism has become the most important cause in the world.

It has become so big that it has replaced youth, peace, and music as the most defining aspiration for young people.

Antizionism is no longer a surging issue; it is the issue.

Every other issue is secondary to antizionism. Issues only matter insofar as they are related to antizionism.

Even the existential threat of climate change has taken a backseat.

In a choice between saving the world and destroying Israel, the latter comes first.

If such a situation feels impossible to imagine, that is because it is.

It is impossible to imagine human beings, as we understood them, would be so bitterly vindictive and small.

But this is a new kind of human being.

Antizionism has changed our entire conception of what it means to be a person.

For the first time since 1945, antizionism reintroduced the idea that one’s human status was based on one’s race.

The entire race of Israelis was declared “unhuman,” but not directly. By labeling the unhumans “zionists” instead of Israelis or Jews, antizionists were able to make it appear that Zionists lost their human status not by nature of their birth but by nature of their behavior.

In the way that a criminal cedes his freedom with his own actions, the Zionist loses his humanity for his beliefs.

This idea has been reinforced so constantly that now it is frankly a given.

However, this constant dehumanization of Zionists has had an unintended effect – it has dehumanized everything.

Music and art, the most human of endeavors, are now devoid of any real humanity. There is no individuality there, only conformity. Who are the rebellious artists going against the tide and standing with Israel? There is no creativity there, only repetitiveness.

Our art is dying along with our humanity. Our respect for individuals is disappearing along with the individuality in the art we consume.

By painting the world in such clear blacks and whites, antizionism has blotted out all nuance. There are no shadows on a black canvas, and there is no depth on a white one. Art and humanity live in the messy in between, in the world of spilled ink and mixed colors.

But a world that can sustain no nuance can sustain no art.

As more and more artists give themselves over to the draconian dictates of antizionism, the quality of our art will continue to decline.

We are never going back to 2022, when it was only a handful of your favorite artists who said cruel things about Israel. We are never going back to 2007, when you could assume that any artist who said or did anything antisemitic would be cancelled. We are never going back.

The curtain has fallen on Act One of the 21st century. The gears are in motion, the actors have their stage directions, and it is time to begin Act Two. What will the next 25 years hold?

I do not know, but I can safely assume that there will be far fewer musical artists I can listen to, far fewer cities I can visit, and far fewer people I can trust.

Somewhere in the world to come, I know that my ancestors are laughing. Those of us who grew up in the unlimited prosperity of American Judaism are all lamenting a return to the way things always were.

Feeling hated, isolated, and unwanted – that is the Jewish historical condition, and that is the condition we are heading towards again.

While all of this can feel terrifying and disheartening, it is important to remember why we celebrate Sukkot.

We celebrate Sukkot, “The festival of booths,” or, as Andrew Cuomo once called it, “That f*cking treehouse holiday,” to remind us about the transitoriness of our history.

We received the Torah in the desert, we took the Torah into exile, and we have brought the Torah with us everywhere we go. Every nation we have lived in during the diaspora has been a Sukkah, not a house, a temporary dwelling, not a home.

There is one eternal home for the one eternal people – everything else is temporary, even the agony of antizionism.

The relative prosperity of American Judaism is over, and the relative pain of this era has begun, but this, like all things, will end one day.

So hold fast. Tie your courage to the sticking place. Take faith in the eternal people.

And, as always,

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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