Shabbat shalom.
Oh boy. Many rants today, please indulge me. How I long for the days when my biggest complaint was a certain orange turd trying to destroy democracy. While that threat continues to haunt my brain (and the country), my inbox, my list of podcasts and my Substack readings grow exponentially, mostly about the shit show going on in Israel. Keeping up with that whirlwind is not easy, and I have tried to make room for voices on both sides to avoid breathing too much algorithmic fumes funneled my way by social media platforms that care more about fueling division than finding the truth. I even listened to Piers Morgan facilitating the dumbest “debate” I have ever seen between Muslim philosopher, scholar and YouTuber Mohammed Hijab and the most famous rabbi in America, Rabbi Shmuley. Shmuley tried his best to swat down the bullshit, but in the end, the hour long debacle left me feeling worse about a potential peace, and a lot dumber. Piers lost control for most of the hour, and Hijab refused to shake the rabbi’s hand.
If you want to hear a more rational and reasoned debate that provides a Palestinian perspective, I recommend this podcast with a discussion between Coleman Hughes and Yousef Munayyer. Yousef is a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst based in Washington, D.C. He was the executive director of the US campaign for Palestinian rights, and previously he directed the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development. I don’t agree at all with his articulation of a one state solution, which I believe is just a veiled plan to get rid of Israel, but at least you can get a sense of where he/they are coming from.
But there was some good news this week, although you wouldn’t know it based on the lame stream media coverage. Here in the Jew S of A, over 300,000 of mostly American Jews and supporters of Israel descended on Washington DC to march in support of Israel. This was the largest gathering of Jews in the history of the country, praying and protesting with their feet, yet our newspapers of record, the NYT and WAPO in particular, relegated the event to the back pages and estimated the crowd at “tens of thousands”.
One of the featured speakers was Deborah Lipstadt, American historian and diplomat, best known as author of Denying the Holocaust, who was recently appointed by President Biden as United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism. She began her speech with this historical reference:
“Two hundred and 30 years ago, President George Washington reassured the Jews of Newport that our new nation would give bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance; his meaning and his message were quite specific: In the United States of America, the bigotry of antisemitism must have no place, no quarter, no haven, no home, for antisemitism, or more explicitly, Jew-hatred—the world’s longest, oldest form of prejudice, [which] has pierced and permeated too many countries, too many cultures, faith and communities.”
And she admonished the crowd thusly: “Let me be clear: Do not sink to the level of those who harass you, do not tear down posters, do not intimidate those who disagree with you, do not cross their path or taunt them as they do to you. But do not cower. Allow no one to make you afraid.”
“The fight will be a long one. But Jews have faced such challenges before and have overcome them. You who hate this evil will prevail because this cause has justice wholly on its side,” the special envoy said. “The fight will be won because there is no option. And because as President Washington reassured the Jews of Newport, this nation gives bigotry no sanction, and 230 years later, that still holds true.” Amen Deborah!
I need to continue my rant about the lame stream media as it continues its unrelenting support of Palestinian propaganda. In yet another example of stupendously bad journalism, the BBC was forced to apologize for one of its presenters saying that IDF soldiers who entered Shifa Hospital in Gaza City “were targeting people including medical teams and Arab speakers,” after she mangled a report that actually said Israeli troops at the hospital were accompanied by “medical teams and Arabic-speaking soldiers.” The BBC has mangled and misrepresented so much of the Israeli-Gaza conflict that the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live offered up this satirical piece. At least Israelis are maintaining a sense of humor through this nightmare. You need to click on the image and then the link to view it. (Substack and X do not play well together. Let’s hope more sponsors follow IBM and Microsoft and pull their ads from Musk’s anti-semitic platform. How can someone so smart be such a flaming a-hole!)
My next rant is regarding Gen Z. WTF people?!! Generation Z (also called Gen Z, zoomers, or post-millennials) is the second-youngest generation, with millennials before and Generation Alpha after. Gen Zers were born between the late 1990s and early 2010s. Currently, Gen Z makes up 20% of the U.S. population. A recent poll foretells of bad things ahead of us with these Zoomers, as 56% of them have an “UNfavorable” view of Israel, compared with 69% of the over 65 crowd that hold a “favorable” view. That gap is not good, and was the subject of Ezra Kleins latest podcast which you can listen to with this link. Klein rightly categorizes three generations of diaspora Jews noting that the youngest, the Gen Z crowd, have only seen a strong, prosperous Israel led by Netanyahu and his extreme right wingers whose actions and policies have sought security through subjugation of the Palestinian people. The danger here is that if Israel loses its moral legitimacy in the eyes of its greatest supporters, we risk losing the world’s good will when we need it most. Like right now! It certainly doesn’t help when TikTok and other platforms help torque up the murderous messages of Osama Bin Laden!
Next week I will add another rant about the indigenous people argument and the nonsense around anti-colonialism. Stay tuned for that, but for now, let’s get to a quick roundup of news for the Jews, courteous of The Forward, Times of Israel, Haaretz and other Jewish journals.
- The latest on the war:
- Family members of those missing and held hostage in Gaza were accompanied by over 30,000 Israelis on the fifth day of their march from Tel Aviv to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, which they were set to reach this afternoon.
- The body of Yehudit Weiss, 65, who was abducted by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, was extracted by IDF troops near the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. In the same structure, soldiers also found military equipment including Kalashnikov rifles and an RPG missile.
- Israel raided other Hamas sites in Gaza overnight, finding more caches of weapons. IDF soldiers also recovered the body of Cpl. Noa Marciano, 19, three days after announcing she had been killed in Hamas captivity.
- Police charged a man with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the death of Paul Kessler, a pro-Israel activist who died after a confrontation at a rally in Los Angeles.
- Gunmen killed one Israeli soldier and injured five others Thursday at a Jerusalem checkpoint. Security has increased since the war began, leading to longer lines. “Anybody who wants to do harm can just go into that traffic jam,” said a nearby Israeli mayor.
- Osama bin Laden’s antisemitic “Letter to America” has gone viral on TikTok. “Everything he said was valid,” said one user among many promoting the screed.
- Jewish celebrities and social media influencers confronted TikTok executives on a private call Wednesday night to urge them to tackle the surge of antisemitism on the platform. “Shame on you,” Sacha Baron Cohen said.
- Opinion | I teach at an Ivy League university. The tolerance for antisemitism has become unbearable – “Amid the current tensions, here is a message to all my faculty colleagues,” writes Dany Bahar, a Forward columnist who is a professor at Brown and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. “You can take whichever side you want on this conflict, even if you — as is often the case — have no stake whatsoever in this part of the world. But if you do not start by outright condemning terrorism and calling out antisemitism whenever you see it as soon as you see it, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.” Read his essay ➤
- 💻 IBM said it would stop advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, after its ads appeared next to antisemitic content – Other advertisers have expressed concern after Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic post this week. (Washington Post, New York Times, Forward)
- 🖼️ Two Holocaust-themed street murals in Milan — one featuring Anne Frank and the other an iconic image of a boy in the Warsaw Ghetto — were defaced with pro-Palestinian messages. (Jerusalem Post)
- The Al-Shifa hospital
- Israel raided buildings on the campus of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, searching for evidence of a Hamas military presence. The Israel Defense Forces released a video showing troops had found rifles, ammunition, body armor and other military equipment in a radiology building.Hamas is believed by both Israel and the U.S. to be operating out of a network of tunnels under the hospital; as Israel’s ground operations have come to focus on Al-Shifa, international conversation about the ethics of raiding a hospital has grown heated.
- Opinion | When terrorists are hiding in hospitals, what is the morality of attacking them? A rabbi weighs in: “Even if Israel is overreacting, it is overreacting in the context of Hamas’s cruel calculations, in which the deaths of thousands of Palestinians (who never agreed to be used as pawns) is a price they deem willing to pay in order to destroy the Jewish state,” argues Rabbi Jay Michaelson. “That, together with the appalling suffering of the innocent, is perhaps the only moral clarity we can hope for.” Read his essay ➤
Let me close with this recording of Barbra Streisand’s conversation with Golda Meir during the 1978 network broadcast of The Stars Salute Israel at 30, followed by a haunting and beautiful version of Barbra singing Hatikvah.
Have a great week everyone, and remember, be careful out there.
Brad out.
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