A “tip of the kippah” this week to Fyodor Dostoevsky, patron saint of tortured souls and men who overthink everything except their own violence. His masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, begins with a murder, but the real brutality isn’t the axe, it’s the moral derangement that follows. Raskolnikov commits the crime; the world behaves as if the victim should apologize for being in the way. And the punishment, the true punishment, isn’t administered by the courts but by the conscience: the slow, sickening realization that guilt, real guilt, has serious emotional burdens. 

And for readers who haven’t cracked open Dostoevsky since college, here’s the heart of it: Raskolnikov’s real sentence isn’t the years he spends in a Siberian labor camp — it’s the collapse of his own psyche. The murder breaks something inside him. The novel’s point is brutally simple: without conscience, punishment is just paperwork. Guilt is the only force powerful enough to transform a criminal into something other than a repeat offender.

Which brings us neatly to the most fucked up diplomacy in modern history, where not only is sanity MIA, but guilt has also gone missing entirely. Putin’s, or Trump’s or whomever’s latest “peace plan” for Ukraine reads like a hostile takeover drafted by the perpetrator — a document in which the criminal offers the terms of his own absolution and the victim is told to be grateful for the privilege of signing. It’s Crime and Punishment inverted: the crime is Russian, the punishment is Ukrainian, and the conscience has been scrubbed out of the script. 

The world’s reaction has been a study in moral whiplash. Some — from European capitals to parts of the GOP to the “Chattering Class” of analysts — responded with appropriate shock, calling Putin’s proposal what it is: extortion with USA letterhead. But too many others, especially among the diplomatic aristocracy of the West, slipped instantly into their familiar verbal gymnastics of “realistic,” “pragmatic,” “a basis for dialogue.” Always the same euphemisms. Always the same expectation that the invaded must accommodate the invader’s emotional needs. This isn’t just a failure of accountability. It’s a failure of conscience — the absence of guilt that makes justice impossible.

The Gaza Ceasefire Parallel

Jews know this psychological inversion intimately — the eternal demand that the wounded express empathy for the one who wounded them.

That same warped geometry reappears in the Israel–Palestinian ceasefire debate. Hamas commits mass murder. Israel responds to prevent more. And the international chorus, safely insulated from rockets and rape, demands Israeli “restraint,” “concessions,” and “compromise,” as though the entire episode were a zoning dispute rather than a monstrous slaughter. In the Crime and Punishment frame, Hamas becomes Raskolnikov with better PR, and Israel becomes the elderly pawnbroker scolded for being murdered at an inconvenient time.

What unites the debates over Ukraine and Israel is not geography but a growing global appetite for peace without responsibility — a peace negotiated on terms set by the aggressor (and facilitated by a deranged orange man child), while the victim is cast as the obstacle.

Here’s the cleanest way to understand the absurdity: imagine if, during a Netanyahu visit to Washington, the American president sat him down and said, “Bibi, you will accept a Palestinian state. Here are the borders. Withdraw from these 26 settlements. Re-divide Jerusalem. Admit this number of refugees. Get it done by Thursday or we cut off U.S. support.”

That scenario is so inconceivable it isn’t even in the same time zone as reality. Yet that’s exactly the framework now being urged on Ukraine: the aggressor sets the terms, the victim is pressured to comply, and the MAGA world pats itself on the back for calling this diplomacy.

If we lived in a normally moral universe, not today’s ethically inverted one, the next step in the Israel–Hamas conflict would be obvious: Hamas’s leadership would be hauled to The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not rewarded with concessions. Not allowed to negotiate over the bodies of kidnapped Israelis. Not permitted to drag out the return of dead hostages to buy time to rebuild, re-arm, and re-brand.

In any sane legal framework, accountability would mean Hamas commanders facing charges for mass rape, torture, and deliberate targeting of civilians; prosecutors presenting the very atrocities Hamas filmed and proudly disseminated; victims’ families confronting the perpetrators in court; and a verdict that names the crime, the criminals, and the communities they destroyed. But even that only addresses the external half of justice. The deeper failure is internal: Hamas feels no guilt, no remorse, no moral break in the psyche — the very precondition for any real reckoning.Without guilt, accountability becomes a procedural performance instead of a path to peace.

But why is there no guilt? Because guilt depends on the belief that the victim has moral standing. And neither Hamas nor the Kremlin grants their victims that dignity.

For Hamas, the absence of guilt is baked into its founding documents, which fuse political extremism with a theology that sanctifies martyrdom and demonizes Jews as cosmic adversaries. A worldview that casts violence as divine mandate cannot produce remorse; it can only produce more violence. In that framework, guilt isn’t just absent, it is considered heresy.

Putin’s Russia, meanwhile, is anchored in a nationalist mythology that denies Ukraine’s legitimacy altogether. If a neighboring nation has no right to exist, then no crime against it is possible. Guilt cannot emerge where the victim’s humanity has been ideologically erased.

This is why neither actor experiences guilt: not because they are uniquely monstrous, but because their worldviews render guilt conceptually impossible.

Instead, Hamas is incentivized away from any form of reckoning whatsoever. Every “pause” becomes a tactical reset. Every concession becomes a precedent. Every extension becomes a subsidy for the next round of violence. This isn’t justice. It’s a protection racket blessed by the grown-ups at the diplomatic table.

Dostoevsky understood what our diplomats refuse to: guilt is the catalyst that makes peace possible. Without guilt, there is no reckoning. Without reckoning, there is no healing. Without healing, there is no peace — only a temporary suspension of hostilities rebranded as progress. Russia is not grappling with guilt. Hamas is not grappling with guilt. Their proposals are not apologies; they are continuation strategies in a nicer font.

Meanwhile, the demands placed on Ukraine and Israel border on satire: Ukraine should negotiate its own amputation; Israel should accept a ceasefire that guarantees Hamas time to reload. This is not peacebuilding. This is guilt laundering for aggressors and moral busywork for everyone else.

And it feels so Jewish because Jews have lived inside this inversion for centuries: told to accept violence quietly, defend ourselves gently, and justify our survival politely. Our pain is always negotiable; our security always provocative.

Dostoevsky gave Raskolnikov a path to redemption only when he faced his crime — when he accepted that he, not his victim, was the problem. Imagine if the world demanded anything similar from Russia. Imagine if Hamas were required to begin there rather than end there.

Instead we get paperwork for the next catastrophe. Because in geopolitics, as in literature, the real punishment isn’t the prison sentence. It’s the reckoning. And until the perpetrators in both conflicts face their own guilt, every “peace plan” is just a pause between crimes with no punishment. 

That’s all for this week. Here’s to a Thanksgiving where the only thing carved up is the turkey, not the moral order of the world. Wishing you all warmth, gratitude, and an extra slice of clarity.

Brad out.

Shabbat shalom.

It was a revealing week on opposite sides of the globe. In the United States, the Epstein email release dominated the news cycle like a chemical spill from a septic tank, confirming yet again that many of our “pillars of society” were actually just frequent-flyer degenerates with expensive legal teams. The documents didn’t expose anything the country didn’t already suspect; they merely reminded us how comfortably powerful men fit into systems that protect their appetites. It was a week drenched in decadence and denial — the smell of a nation losing its shit. 

Six thousand miles away, something very different was unfolding. Not rot, not spectacle, not the familiar choreography of American scandal, but clarity — the kind that only emerges in a democracy fighting for its life.

In Israel, attention returned to Rafah, where hundreds of Hamas fighters remain trapped like rats in the smuggling and assault tunnels they once believed made them untouchable. The Israel Defense Forces control the ground above them. The exits are sealed. The oxygen is dwindling. The only thing left down there is bad air, bad choices, and the overdue bill for October 7th taped to the wall. 

While diplomats shuttle between hotel lobbies in Doha and Cairo proposing ceasefire plans that seem drafted by an un-trained ChatGPT, Israel confronts a reality that cannot be massaged or negotiated away: no political or humanitarian plan is credible as long as Hamas remains intact as a military or governing force.

That fact is obvious in Israel. It is radioactive in Washington.

This contrast — America rotting at the top while Israel fights for its life — gives the week its larger meaning. One country at peace is rotting from within; one country at war is rediscovering its moral core. The contrast could not be more stark. 

Israel’s war has generated the usual flood of Western “expert” proposals, many of them well-meaning but detached from the physics and reality on the ground. International ‘stabilization zones’ that no nation is willing to staff. A refurbished Palestinian Authority that exists only in PowerPoint. ‘Technocratic transition bodies’ that dissolve on contact with oxygen. And the evergreen favorite: the ‘permanent ceasefire now, negotiations later’, an idea that would make sense only if Hamas were a misunderstood Scandinavian political party.

These are not realistic solutions. Not a single country has so far agreed to put their soldiers at risk and die defending Israel. Urban-warfare experts can theorize about ‘bubble zones’ and Kosovo lessons all day, but my muscle memory goes straight to Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq — the graveyard of every elegant Western stabilization theory. 

Israel, meanwhile, is confronting reality without euphemism. It is doing so while rescuing hostages, fighting on multiple fronts, absorbing rocket fire, burying its dead, and navigating the political aftershocks of the country’s worst intelligence failure in decades. And yet something unexpected — almost astonishing — is happening inside Israeli society.

The young soldiers and reservists returning from the battlefield are not coming home radicalized or more entrenched in their ideological corners. They are coming home chastened, wiser, and, as writer Yossi Klein Halevi has observed, newly sensitive to the dangers of internal division. They understand that the catastrophe of October 7 was not simply an external attack. It was an attack that exploited the fractures Israel allowed to widen within itself.

These young Israelis — the ones who actually fought, who broke down doors and carried out evacuations and sat in tanks for days on end — are returning with a profound hunger for unity. They are returning home with a moral seriousness that makes Israel’s current leadership look painfully small. They want fewer ideological knives and more shared purpose. They want a country that argues, as Israel always has, but argues toward a future rather than toward rupture.

They are rediscovering the original spirit of ingathering: not merely the physical return of Jews from around the world, but the gathering of the full spectrum of Jewish ideas — secular, religious, left, right, traditional, experimental — into a single, complicated national story. Israeli society has always been the place where Jewish history argues with itself. What’s new is that a generation of Israelis now wants to argue differently.

And they bring extraordinary resources to that task. Israel remains, as Halevi points out, a society with a density of talent unmatched anywhere else: intellectually serious, emotionally mature, morally alert. As Halevi puts it with characteristic clarity:

“You meet a kid here, you meet high school students. The level of conversation that you could have with them, the level of their engagement, is very, very deep and profound. October 7th, if it did anything, it made Israelis realize that our existence is not self-evident and that we have to work on it.

And that we have to show up and what type of country we’re gonna have is gonna be in our hands. There isn’t a sense of powerlessness amongst the Israeli. Now, one of the challenges is how does this density of talent then translate itself on the political realm and demanding of our politicians, you know, as that general said at the beginning of the war in Gaza, you have to be worthy of these soldiers.”

That is the new standard. Not political survival. Not coalition math. ‘Worthiness’.

The question now — the one that will define Israel’s political future — is whether this newfound unity and moral seriousness can be translated into leadership.

Israel’s political decay did not begin on October 7, but the rebirth of its civic spirit might have. While the West frets, equivocates, and indulges its most unserious impulses, Israel is emerging from crisis with a new generation that understands the stakes — and understands that the country must be rebuilt not only physically but morally, politically, and spiritually.

When the war ends, Israel will face choices more consequential than any battlefield decision. It will have to decide whether to rebuild its political life with the same clarity, courage, and unity that its young soldiers carried into battle. If it can meet that moment — if it can forge leaders worthy of those who showed up when history called — then October 7 will be remembered not only as a day of horror but as the beginning of Israel’s next great story.

Not a story written in tunnels.

Not a story written in darkness.

A story written in daylight — where Israel has always chosen to stand.

The question now is whether Israel will choose leaders who can stand there with it

That’s all for the week. Enjoy the weekend everyone, and as usual, be safe out there.

Brad out.

Shabbat shalom!

I’m taking the week off to visit with family. 

There really wasn’t much to write about anyway, just the incredibly horrendous shit which is now considered “normal”: Masked ICE agents snatching people off the street, the National Guard sent into major cities on the obviously false pretense that these cities are shit holes under siege, the U.S. military brazenly blowing up people on the high seas, huge tariffs that will inflict heavy economic burdens and that have already destroyed alliances that took generations to build. And lets not forget that green energy and clean tech have been eviscerated, revenge and vindictive prosecutions are now the norm, many millions are on course to lose their health insurance, and the orange man child, in addition to stealing $230 million from taxpayer coffers and posting memes of himself showering half the country with literal shit, has also decided to raze the historic East Wing of the White House and replace it with a gilded monster ballroom without any review or approvals by anyone. Just another normal week.

As Andrew Sullivan noted in his weekly post, “The bottom has already fallen out of any semblance of public dignity for the United States government.”

So, forget about all that “winning”, try to enjoy the weekend, and take comfort in over 8 million of us taking to the streets to express our dissent in watching our democracy get demolished like a wing of the White House. 

And to make you feel even better about things, here is some Jew News of the week, courtesy of Nellie Bowles, (wife of Bari Weiss), who writes a weekly sarcastic punch at the news for The Free Press.

→ News of the Jews: You know the situation is bad. I know the situation is bad. Yes, I will tell you when I pack a go-bag.

One interesting thing to know is that our commentariat are true hardcore Hamasniks, like even within Gaza they would be on the militant side. Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament from France, seemed to celebrate the news that Hamas was hunting down dissidents in Gaza. She posted a story about how “groups in Gaza that collaborated with the Israeli army” are being killed by Hamas during the ceasefire and added the caption: “one by one.” Like, go get ’em all, boys! Bushra Shaikh, a popular British media personality, had this to say: “People who betrayed their countries to support the Nazis after WWII faced severe consequences, including execution. This is no different. . . . Hamas are only doing what they have to, for the little stability Palestinians have.” Right.

Over in audio media, Louis Theroux, the beloved British journalist, has fallen. Here he is this week on a podcast, claiming that Jewish national identity has become a role model for all racism, the inspiration for all ethno-religious nationalism around the world.

There’s an even more macro lens which you can put on it which is that Jewish identity in the Jewish community, as expressed in Israel, has become almost like an acceptable quote, unquote, way of understanding ethno-nationalism. And so it’s like they’re prototyping an aggressive form of ethno-nationalism, which is then rolled out, whether it’s by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Trump in the U.S. . . . . It’s become sort of this certain sense of post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism or Zionist exceptionalism, has become a role model on the national stage for what these white identitarians would like to do in their own countries.

The feeling I have now is similar to the one I had during the height of #MeToo, when every morning brought news of another famous mogul who had been trapping interns in his car, or a beloved actor who turned out to have a rape button under his desk. Now, I wake up each day to another person I respected who suddenly has a lot of rage toward one very specific group of people, who suddenly thinks the world’s ills can be put on this one little group. Et tu, Theroux?

Theroux has a similar philosophy to Irish actress Denise Gough, who argued that if we destroy Israel, then every evil nation in the world will snap into goodness: “The Death Star apparently has a place in it that if you shoot through that specific place in the Death Star, you explode the entire Death Star,” Denise explained. “And so somebody said Palestine is that place, and the construction, the Death Star, is like all of it: Sudan, Congo, all of it, everywhere, Nigeria now, everywhere. If we can free Palestine, it explodes everything.” Love this logic. Really sophisticated stuff.

Another to fall is moderate Seth Moulton, a nice congressman in Massachusetts. Rep. Moulton last week announced he’d be returning all AIPAC money donated to him and would no longer accept AIPAC donations, which is, of course, fine, if that were a blanket rule of his, but he accepts donations and even a junket from Qatari advocacy groups, but who cares about that. AIPAC is also the Death Star.

Over at Pomona College in Southern California, a campus Jewish group was hosting an October 7 survivor to speak about his experience in captivity and resilience and whatever else you can imagine someone might say to make sense of life after that happens. The talk was interrupted by masked protesters dressed in pseudo-Hamas garb (keffiyehs over their faces except for little eye slits), who attempted to storm the room. You see, the idea of a Jewish man escaping Hamas is infuriating (how dare he!). So kids in America put on the clothing of his attackers to scream at him. Across the world, pretty little blond boy Oxford students are now this week chanting: “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground.”

Tucker Carlson did an episode on Covid with Dr. Andrew Huff, where Tuck was sure to imply that Covid has a Jewish angle to it: “I remember Bobby Kennedy got into a great deal of trouble because he said at some event. . . that Covid could be tailored, that for whatever reason Covid had disparate effects on populations,” Tuck said, prodding his guest: “What does that mean? Which populations suffered less from Covid?” The answer, per our guest: Ashkenazi Jews. The implication is obvious. Even though Covid was made in China, by the Chinese, with some funding from America, Tucker is managing to sprinkle a little Maybe it was the Jews on top. That pangolin wore a yarmulke!

And because no week is complete without checking in on Candace Owens, now she’s claiming that Kirk’s assassination was a plot involving Turning Point USA, the U.S. military, the CIA, Mossad, the Mormons, and many paid actors. “I actually believe that this was a military hit that involved foreign actors, and also literal actors. I believe that that day ran something akin to JFK’s assassination. I believe that there were therefore multiple decoys on the ground.” I’m terrified of Candace, but I also can’t get enough of her. It’s all the theories, all at once. Something feels off, and therefore everyone is an actor in Candace’s world. Must be stressful.

And that was this week’s news of the Jews.

Yikes.

If you are looking for something to make you laugh this week, here is a link to a post from Shalom Auslander’s Fetal Position, called , “Bris Amiss”, a funny satire on one of RFK Jr’s most recent stupid claims, that Tylenol given for circumcision increases the likelihood of autism. As Shalom says, “Maybe yarmulkas cause brain tumors.”

Be safe out there everyone.

Brad out. 

Here is something to make you smile: one of our little nachas machines, Cam, who really enjoyed my pasta dish!

Shabbat shalom.

Political junkie David Axelrod once quipped that he wasn’t sure if history had a sense of justice, but that it certainly had a sense of humor. I’m starting to think history also has the social skills of a drunk uncle at a bar mitzvah. So, despite the challenge to my gag reflex, a reluctant “tip of the kippah” to President Trump, the orange man-child who somehow took Biden’s mothballed peace framework, blew off the Gaza dust, and shoved it back onto center stage. Not through diplomacy or empathy, but through the only tools he’s ever trusted: a Rolodex full of autocrats, the subtlety of a leaf blower, and an ego that treats applause as oxygen. 

Whatever his motivation might be, a Nobel, his incessant need to control the conversation, or simply stopping the killing, I think there’s a dark grace in all this. Sometimes history’s instruments are ugly. Sometimes the necessary work arrives wearing the wrong orange face. Maybe the Almighty’s sense of irony runs so deep She sent a peace deal through an orange man child who can achieve detente in the middle east but declares war on blue cities back home.

Then, as if on cue, the Nobel Committee handed this year’s Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader fighting her own quiet revolution for democracy. Trump’s dream of being crowned the world’s greatest dealmaker died in Oslo before the shrimp cocktail at Mar-a-Lago was even served. Somewhere between Palm Beach and Norway, an aide is probably drafting an executive order declaring the Nobel Committee a “woke globalist terror cell.”

But let’s not get too cute. Phase One of this twenty-one-point plan deserves genuine, unsarcastic gratitude. The hostages coming home isn’t a talking point; it’s a moral and emotional overhaul on shattered families and a national nightmare given back its first small measure of justice. It lifts a tremendous weight off the exhausted shoulders of the Israeli people. The reunions will be a blessing. The photos and videos precious. Celebrate them. No irony required. 

But let’s not pretend these concessions were given for free. Trump didn’t just lean on Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt with moral suasion. He dusted off The Art of the Deal and went full sequel. Qatar got a NATO-lite promise of American protection, Turkey got the return of its coveted F-35s and the quiet lifting of sanctions, and Egypt got what it has always wanted most: secure borders and a guarantee that the chaos of Gaza would not spill into Sinai. These were not magnanimous gestures. They were bribes disguised as diplomacy, The Art of the Deal translated into Arabic, Turkish, and bureaucratese. Trump doesn’t charm; he leverages. He doesn’t negotiate; he corners. And for once, that instinct may have served the cause of peace. It took Israeli military might along with Trump’s bullying to get this done, a combination that President Biden could never have delivered. 

Still, beneath the handshakes and the headlines lies a truth so obvious it hurts to say out loud: both sides are being asked to swallow poison. For Israel, it means watching some 250 convicted murderers and terrorists, the architects of massacres, the bomb-planters, the knife-wielders, walk out of their cells in exchange for hostages. The same men who shattered Israeli families will stroll into hero’s welcomes on the streets of Gaza and Nablus. It’s a nauseating calculus, but that’s what this peace required – a deal made with the unbearable.

And even as Hamas signs on the dotted line, Israel knows the organization’s playbook by heart: regroup, rearm, and repeat. A movement built on annihilation doesn’t become a governing partner overnight. It bides its time. It trains its next generation of “martyrs.” It waits for the world’s attention to drift. And when it does, the cycle begins again, another October 7, another pogrom, another reminder that evil doesn’t retire. Another such reminder took place just the other day in the streets of Gaza. When the ceasefire was announced, thousands poured into the rubble to celebrate what they believed was a Hamas victory. Amid the jubilation came an old chant: “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud, jaish Muhammad sa-ya’ud!” — “Jews of Khaybar, Muhammad’s army will return.” The war may have paused, but the hatred hasn’t even broken a sweat.

The next generation of Palestinian leadership. At least they look well fed. 

And while Gaza commands the world’s sympathy, the next act of this uneasy peace will play out across Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, a patchwork of divided towns, armed factions, and fading authority. The Palestinian Authority (PA), bloated by corruption and discredited by years of impotence, is supposed to serve as the political scaffolding for the future Palestinian state envisioned in Phase Two of Trump’s plan. But it’s a scaffolding missing more than a few planks and half its bolts. Mahmoud Abbas governs little more than Ramallah, and even there, he’s about as popular as a traffic ticket.

The next phase demands that the PA prove it can govern without graft, pay teachers instead of militias and martyrs, and articulate a vision of self-rule that doesn’t hinge on Israel’s erasure. Meanwhile, Israel will be asked to loosen its grip on parts of Area C, the territory that is both strategically vital and spiritually loaded. That’s not likely to happen.

And here, in my humble opinion, lies the bleak truth: Phase Two contains irreconcilable differences that no amount of diplomacy can resolve. According to many experts, the ceasefire’s strategic trajectory points toward renewed conflict rather than sustainable peace. The agreement’s fundamental contradictions—Hamas disarming itself, governance transition challenges, Israeli withdrawal contingent on security that won’t exist, statehood aspirations incompatible with Israeli policy—represent a “bigly” risky bet that cannot be resolved through negotiation because they reflect genuinely irreconcilable positions. Hamas survives militarily degraded but still intact. Its ideology, that Israel’s destruction is both possible and required, remains unchanged. Its external leadership continues operating from Doha. Its military commander in Gaza survived. Its institutional infrastructure, though damaged, retains the capacity for rebuilding. 

More broadly and philosophically speaking, one side views the land as divinely promised, the other as divinely stolen. The borders aren’t just drawn on maps, they’re etched into scripture and identity. No summit, no joint communique, no “mutual recognition clause” can untangle that. At best, the world can broker pauses, moments of exhausted coexistence and hostage/prisoner swaps. But peace? Peace is a word that will always sound aspirational here, at least until Palestinians care more about loving their own children than killing Jews. 

So, no kenahoras, he artfully negotiated a deal to get the hostages back. But alas, the orange man child didn’t get his Nobel. He’s too busy calling Democrats “enemies of the state” on Truth Social, sending troops into blue cities, cutting aid and life saving vaccines to poor countries, and avoiding the Epstein files while brokering an uneasy peace in the Middle East. But if this bizarre cocktail of ego and grievance somehow drags us through a successful Phase Two, if his need for applause outlasts his need for vengeance, then I’ll do the unthinkable….

I’ll nominate him for the Nobel myself. 

Be careful out there and try to, with all due respects, control your gag reflexes.

Brad out.

(October 7, Two Years Later)

Two years after October 7, the test is no longer just for Israel’s survival, but for the soul of the Jewish people — whether we still stand together when the world looks away.

Two years ago this week, the gates of hell opened on a Saturday morning. It was the day after Simchat Torah, a day meant for dancing, and instead the music stopped and horror ensued. What began as a massacre became a test: not only of Israel’s defenses, but of the world’s conscience, and of Jewish faith itself.

Now, as we approach the second anniversary of October 7, there is a peace deal on the table. We all pray it succeeds. But prayer, as the families of the hostages know too well, is not a strategy. And hope is not a plan. Hamas has broken every ceasefire it has ever agreed to, and no one should doubt its willingness to use this one, if it happens, to inflict more psychological torment on the people it already brutalized.

Still, the greater test this year may not be on the battlefield. It may be that the greater test is in the hearts of Jews everywhere, Jews who are staring down unbearable questions about loyalty, justice, and identity.

For me, that test has been personal. I began The Jew News Review to rediscover and reclaim my own Jewish identity, a part of myself that had gone quiet. By sharing that journey here, I hoped to celebrate and pass forward that Jewish DNA to family, friends, readers, and future generations. That goal has not changed. But as the Gaza war grinds on, as Israel grows more isolated and Jews around the world face rising hostility, the questions have grown heavier: questions of faith, of morality, of spirit. On that test, I still believe in the righteousness of Israel’s cause, in the courage of our people, and in the unbreakable spirit that binds Israelis and Jews in every corner of the world.

For me, and probably for many of you, the second anniversary feels less like a commemoration than a reckoning. We are not just remembering what happened to us, rather, we are questioning who we have become since.

In synagogues, on campuses, and across family tables, I fear there is a quiet crisis of faith unfolding, not just in God but in Israel itself. Among Jews who grew up believing in tikkun olam, universal justice, and coexistence, the prolonged war and how Israel is conducting it, has strained that idealism to the breaking point. It is one thing to fight a just war; it is another to live in one that kills so many and refuses to end.

And yet, this is the moral hazard of the moment: that Jews, in the pursuit of moral comfort, will abandon Israel and the hostages during a war Israel did not ask for. That we will confuse compassion with complicity, and distance with dignity.

Because that’s what’s happening in real time. Too many mistake performative empathy for moral depth — as if mourning loudly for Palestinians while whispering about Hamas somehow makes one more humane. And too many believe that staying “neutral” or “balanced” in the face of barbarism preserves their dignity, when in fact it only preserves their comfort.

You can see it in Hollywood’s red-hand brigade, those actors who pinned on fake bloody hand pins at award shows to show how deeply they “care,” while remaining silent about the real blood spilled on October 7, or the hostages still enduring it every day. That kind of moral theater isn’t courage. It’s camouflage. A way to look righteous without risking anything real. Silence may look dignified from a safe distance, but it feels like betrayal to those still under fire.

But Israel cannot move on. Not from children burned alive. Not from women raped and paraded. Not from families still waiting for a knock at the door that could mean death or deliverance.

Even more disturbing, a recent Washington Post poll found that nearly 40 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza. This is beyond absurd; it is obscene. Jews, of all people, should know better than to casually weaponize that word. To accuse the one Jewish state on Earth of genocide is not just ignorance, it is moral betrayal. To compare Israel’s fight for survival to the machinery of annihilation that murdered our grandparents is to desecrate memory itself.

The age of post-Holocaust sympathy has faded under the bright lights of mainstream media misinformation, social media algorithms feeding Hamas propaganda to the TikTok generation, and real atrocities being committed in Gaza. The world’s brief reverence for Jewish suffering has given way to its old reflexes – suspicion, resentment, and moral inversion. The Jewish People are once again being tested, not by whether we can assimilate, but by whether we can withstand.

As Dara Horn wrote in The World Loves Dead Jews, the world has always found comfort in Jewish tragedy but discomfort in Jewish survival. It applauds our suffering but resents our strength. It builds memorials to our ashes but condemns our defenses. October 7 reminded us that Jewish power is not a moral flaw. It is a moral necessity. Because the lesson of our history, from Egypt to Europe to Sderot, is that Jewish survival has never depended on the world’s approval.

The war in Gaza has made one truth unavoidable: the Jewish story has never been about comfort. It has always been about courage. It’s about showing up for one another when the world turns away. That is the test within the test. Not whether Israel will survive, but whether we, scattered and weary as we are, will remember who we are and why we endure.

To be Jewish after October 7 is to hold fast to faith even when faith feels impossible. It is to long for and weep for peace and still stand for justice. It is to know that the world may never love us for surviving, but to survive anyway.

Stay safe out there everyone.

Brad out.