France has given the world so much to admire. The Enlightenment. Impressionism. The croissant. Existentialism, cinema, Sartre. And diplomacy itself, la diplomatie, not just in practice but in vocabulary. From détente to rapprochement, from chargé d’affairesto coup d’état, France has authored the lexicon of conflict resolution and international civility. It’s no accident that diplomats once trained in French and conducted negotiations in the language of Voltaire. Even the word “protocol” traces its roots to the French bureaucratic tradition.

And so it’s with no small irony, no grande ironie, if you will, that the nation that gave us the language of diplomacy has chosen this moment to obliterate its meaning.

In September, when the UN convenes to vote on Palestinian statehood, France’s Macron has stated that it will vote yes. That’s not just a vote for statehood. That’s a vote to canonize mass murder. That’s a vote to reward Hamas with legitimacy for the butchery of Israeli civilians on October 7. It’s as if France took a long, hard look at the blood-soaked massacre of Jews, the beheadings, the burnings, the hostage-taking, and concluded: oui, ça mérite un drapeau. 

So let’s drop the facade of entente cordiale and respond in the only diplomatic French phrase America ever truly perfected:

“Fuck you, France.”

Let’s say this plainly: France, and any liberal democracy following in its misguided footsteps (I’m thinking of you Canada, Norway, Spain and Ireland), is preparing to validate a statehood bid born not out of diplomacy, peace-building, or governance, but from the ashes of pogroms live-streamed in HD. We’re not talking about recognition of some theoretical democratic Palestine from the Oslo Accords era, with handshakes on the White House lawn and Nobel Peace Prize photo-ops. We’re talking about now, post-October 7, when Hamas terrorists filmed themselves laughing while executing children and abducting grandmothers. That is what France is legitimizing.

And here’s where the French vocabulary fails entirely. Because there is no savoir-fairein Hamas leadership, no grande stratégie in launching rockets from schoolyards, and certainly no haute diplomatie in using raped hostages as bargaining chips. This isn’t a state-in-waiting. It’s a death cult with a press office.

Of course, the pro-recognition crowd will tell you this is about “hope” for the Palestinian people. And yes, Palestinians deserve hope, and dignity, and freedom from both occupation and the jackboot of Hamas. But giving them a state run by Hamas or even under the shadow of its terror apparatus isn’t hope, it’s abandoning them to another generation of ruin. It’s feeding a broken system with global legitimacy. It’s giving the keys to the asylum to the arsonists inside.

And don’t fall for the diplomatic sleight of hand. France will insist that it supports a two-state solution, but only one state, Israel, is ever asked to make sacrifices. Only one state is expected to bury its dead and then get over it. Only one state is scrutinized for its self-defense, while the other side can massacre civilians and be greeted with standing ovations in university lecture halls.

Let’s be clear about the historical narrative this vote could cement: If October 7 becomes the first chapter in the founding story of the Palestinian state, then the message to the world’s terrorists is simple: kill Jews, get land. Hostage-taking becomes a tactic of statecraft. Pogroms become policy. And liberal democracies, those paragons of moral superiority, become the enablers.

If France votes “yes,” it won’t just be voting to recognize Palestine. It will be voting to normalize Hamas. To elevate them. To institutionalize their ideology. It will be drawing a straight line from the ashes of Nir Oz to the flags at the UN Plaza.

History is watching. And if it records that the first sovereign act of the Palestinian state was the murder of 1,200 Jews, then this isn’t diplomacy. It’s complicity.

And yet, I still believe in peace. And I still believe, naively, stubbornly, optimistically, that a two-state solution is possible. But not this one. Not one born in blood and barbed wire, not one midwifed by Hamas and cheered on by the morally disoriented in Paris. A Palestinian state should arise from negotiations, not nightmares; from co-existence, not carnage. Until then, France and the UN aren’t building a future, they’re desecrating a grave.

So it will fall to the United States, who, despite being led by an orange man child, is still the adult in the room with the veto power to stop this grotesque performance. If it chooses, it can kill this diplomatic farce before it becomes precedent. If it chooses, it can stand up for the idea that Jewish lives are not a bargaining chip. The orange man child, who moved the embassy to Jerusalem, now has a choice: veto a Palestinian state born of massacre… or go down in history as the schmuck who gave Hamas a seat next to Luxembourg.

I bristle whenever I write this, but I will be rooting for the orange man child to make the right decision. 

Brad out. 

Shabbat shalom!

While the orange man continues his efforts to cancel Sesame Street, I thought it would be fitting to dedicate the theme of this post to one of my favorite Sesame characters, Kermit the Frog. 

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Kermit first sang those words in 1970, his felt forehead creased with existential gloom. It was a melancholy little number about feeling invisible, overlooked, burdened by a difference no one seemed to value. Green, he sang, “blends in with so many other ordinary things.” But deep down, the song wasn’t about blending in. It was about being othered—about learning, eventually, to be proud of what sets you apart, even when the world makes you pay for it.

Over half a century later, Kermit’s lament has taken on new meaning. For diaspora Jews in 2025, it’s no longer just a Sesame Street singalong—it’s a mood, a metaphor, a whole damn vibe. Because right now, we are living through a moment where the pressure to shrink, to apologize, to blend in has never been more intense. In the span of one week, The New York Times delivered a trifecta of cultural whiplash: first, a scathing long-form essay accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war in Gaza to serve his own political survival; second, an op-ed by Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, accusing Israel of becoming a “Jewish supremacist” state, one that, in his words, has “come to resemble some of the darkest regimes of the 20th century”; and third, a viral interview on The Daily with actor Mandy Patinkin, who compared Israel’s war in Gaza to his Princess Bride character’s revenge fantasy, and asked:  “How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and do it to someone else?”

Three different men. One Ivy Tower. One Hollywood/Broadway. One Balfour Street. But the same message: Jewish suffering is real, but Jewish defense is suspect—and Jewish power, even when wielded in the name of survival, is now suspect, too. Bibi Netanyahu’s alleged manipulation of war timelines to preserve his own political power doesn’t just erode trust in Israel’s leadership—it hands ammunition to those already eager to portray the Jewish state as morally bankrupt. They beg the question: “October 7th may have been brutal, but haven’t we become the monsters we once fled?”

In the context of daily reports of civilian casualties, of Palestinians killed while sitting in Church or waiting in line for food or water, the question is getting more and more difficult for Jews to answer. The unbearable weight of October 7 and the ongoing hostage crisis has seared itself into the national psyche. But alongside that trauma, Israel is also absorbing a growing blow to its moral standing in the eyes of the world, as the conduct of the war draws increasing scrutiny. The tension between those two burdens—grief and global judgment—is taking a quiet, corrosive toll on the country’s spiritual well-being.

This is the climate we’re in. This is the soil from which our children and grandchildren are trying to grow Jewishly. And it’s why this week, Kermit’s lament hits harder and different. Because it’s not easy being green. Not when “green” now means Jewish. And not when the very people who once embraced our story are now telling us—firmly, gently, heartbreakingly—to shut up, sit down, and stop being so damn visible.

This is a story about that tension. About how it feels to be a diaspora Jew in a world that has turned on us with shocking speed—and about how, despite it all, we’re still here. Still green. Still growing.

There was a time—not long ago—when diaspora Jews could pretend we had blended in. We became valedictorians, senators, Oscar winners, Supreme Court justices, and stand-up comedians. We put our Hebrew school diplomas in drawers and our mezuzahs up quietly. We changed our names from Goldstein to Greene (oy, the irony) and thought the tide of assimilation would keep the pitchforks at bay. We voted blue, donated to the ACLU, and joined the DEI committees, because we believed in a pluralistic promise: if we fight for everyone else, surely someone will fight for us. We’ve spent decades embedding ourselves in liberal movements, often at great personal and communal cost, hoping to be seen as allies. But when the time came to cash in that moral equity, what did we find? A bounced check.

We marched for Black lives. We stood for LGBTQ rights. We fought Islamophobia and cheered for refugees. But when Jews were slaughtered, raped, burned alive in October 2023, those same movements didn’t just ignore us—they gaslit us. They explained our grief away. They posted infographics about “context” and “power dynamics.” They told us our dead children were political abstractions. 

So yes, Kermit, it is really not easy being green. And yes—we are green. Green with rage that the very spaces Jews helped build are now turning us away at the gate.

In publishing, Jewish editors and agents whisper privately that they can no longer advocate openly for Jewish stories—especially ones that don’t paint Israel as the villain. Book proposals from Jews who refuse to denounce Zionism are suddenly “not the right fit.” Award-winning Jewish authors are disinvited from festivals for refusing to issue statements against Israeli “apartheid.” We’ve watched book lists celebrating diversity suddenly find Judaism too complicated, too controversial, too white-adjacent to qualify. 

The arts? You mean the industry built by Jews? Where half the great American songbook was written by men named Gershwin and Berlin, where Jewish comics invented late night, where Jewish producers invented Hollywood? That arts world?

That world has decided we’re expendable.

Ask the Jewish playwrights and screenwriters who can’t get their scripts read unless they come prepackaged with a paragraph explaining how they “stand against genocide.” Ask the actors dropped by agents or silenced by PR firms for posting Israeli flags. Ask the gallery owners being boycotted for exhibiting Jewish artists, or the dancers forced to defend their birthright trips like they’re war crimes.

And ask us what it feels like to watch Mandy Patinkin—Inigo Montoya himself, Saul Berenson, the man who carried Yiddishkeit into American living rooms—take to The New York Times Daily to call Israel’s Gaza campaign “unconscionable. There was no mention of Hamas’s October 7th massacre. No political analysis—just the quiet accusation that the Jewish state, in defending itself, has violated its moral soul. For many diaspora Jews, it was like watching a hero unplug from the narrative—like a band’s frontman trashing the stage mid‑concert. You feel abandoned. And it validates the grief many of us have been carrying for months.

Because when even Mandy’s voice joins the chorus questioning the morality of our survival, you know something’s broken. Jews are being made to walk through ideological metal detectors. And the only way through is to disavow your people.

What’s most enraging is that this exclusion is happening not in spite of our contributions, but because of them. Jews helped build these spaces. We helped build the publishing houses, the universities, the studios, the concert halls. We built them because we believed in a shared cultural inheritance—a belief in ideas, in beauty, in books and learning, in progress. And now we are told that our presence is oppressive. That our history is a burden. That our success is a form of theft.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are demanding what everyone else gets: the right to show up fully—visibly, Jewishly, green as hell—and not be punished for it.

But instead, we’re being told that unless we denounce Zionism, unless we disclaim our people, unless we disavow the only Jewish state on Earth, we cannot participate. That is not activism. That is ideological blackmail. We are being cancelled, if that’s still a thing. 

So yes. We are green with rage.

And yet, even in this scorched earth moment, we are seeing something remarkable: growth. Green shoots, poking up even through the Gaza rubble and the cracks in the sidewalks of the diaspora world. Sprouts of solidarity, courage, and unapologetic Jewish pride.

Jewish students are forming new campus coalitions like New Zionist Congress and Jews on Campus to push back against the tide. At Brandeis University, the administration banned Students for Justice in Palestine, drawing a moral line others were too scared to draw.

Digital creators like Julia Jassey, Miriam Anzovin, and Noa Tishby are using TikTok and Instagram to reach millions with a message of Jewish resilience, history, and unfiltered truth. On stages around the world, Israeli artists are refusing to self-cancel. Internationally known acts like Matisyahu have returned to the spotlight with renewed urgency, performing openly Jewish and Zionist anthems in defiance of boycott pressure. At the Eurovision Song Contest, Eden Golan stood tall while crowds outside chanted for her country’s death. She sang anyway.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement, StandWithUs, The Jewish Leadership Project, and #EndJewHatred are fighting on the legal, educational, and civil rights fronts. Meanwhile, The Free Press and Sapir Journal are telling the stories mainstream media refuses to publish.

Green isn’t just the color of envy or rage. It’s the color of resistance. Of renewal. Of Jewish stubbornness in the face of exile and erasure. And we’re not done growing. We are learning, again, what our grandparents knew: we cannot outsource our dignity. We cannot subcontract our safety. And we certainly cannot beg for our humanity from people who only extend it when it’s politically convenient.

But what we can do—what we’ve always done—is build. Build new spaces. New coalitions. New culture. New stories. And when the old structures collapse under the weight of their hypocrisy, we will still be standing. Green. Glorious. Unapologetically alive.

If you want us to be silent, you picked the wrong people. And if you thought this moment would make us fade into assimilation or step out of the spotlight? You obviously haven’t met our mothers and grand mothers.

And maybe here’s the twist Kermit never saw coming: maybe green doesn’t need to blend in. Maybe green should stand out. Maybe it should flash like an emergency beacon—a color that demands attention, that says “We are here, we are proud, and we are not going anywhere.”

Maybe being green is the whole point.

So this weekend, as you sip your oat milk latte while reading the JNR and consider whether to wear your Star of David necklace outside your shirt, remember Kermit’s second verse—the one we forget. He realizes, eventually, that green is beautiful. “It’s beautiful,” he sings, “and I think it’s what I want to be.”

Yes. It’s not easy being green. And yes, it aint easy being Jewish these darkened days. But it’s still worth it. 

And I think it’s what I want to be.

Be safe out there everyone. And have a great weekend!

Brad out.

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Shabbat shalom!

Let’s travel in the wayback machine to London, circa 1967. It’s just before the curtain rises on Fiddler on the Roof at a London theater, when Chaim Topol—Israel’s iconic Tevye—steps out before the audience. War had broken out back home. The Jewish state, surrounded by Arab armies vowing its destruction, was under existential threat. Topol announces he is leaving the production to join his fellow citizens in defense of Israel. The audience leaps to its feet in wild, thunderous applause. Not a slow clap of moral confusion. Not a begrudging acknowledgment that “it’s complicated.” No, this is real, heartfelt and sincere. They understand that this is a moment of moral clarity. The Jews had learned, finally, how to fight back.

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Flash forward to June 2025’s Glastonbury Festival. Same island, different universe. Bob Vylan, a self-styled punk duo with more slogans than melodies, leads a crowd of well-fed, fashionably radical British festivalgoers in a chant: “Death to the IDF! Death to the IDF!” The crowd roars and chants along with them in approval—ecstatic, righteous, dripping with the performative adrenaline of a revolutionary LARP. It’s Woodstock for antisemites in bucket hats.

What the hell happened? As David Byrne of the Talking Heads once asked, “This is not my beautiful house…..How did we get here”?

It’s tempting to mark 1973’s Yom Kippur War as one of the inflection points in Israel’s historic fall from public grace . But while the trauma of that war certainly helped reshape Israeli politics internally, it didn’t flip the world’s moral compass just yet. Israel was still seen as a democracy fighting for its life. Sympathy remained strong, and U.S. support deepened. My generation was still happy to donate money to plant trees in Israel and help turn the desert green. 

By the 1980s, anti-Zionism had found a cozy home on the left. Once the province of neo-Nazis and Soviet propagandists, it was now stylish among campus radicals and armchair revolutionaries. The Palestinian cause became a kind of moral coat rack—everyone could hang their politics on it. Marxists, Islamists, anarchists, even Christian pacifists. Palestine became a litmus test for leftist virtue. And Israel? It became a dirty word. Even worse, “Zionist” became a slur. The fact that nearly half the world’s Jews live in Israel? Minor detail. The fact that Zionism is the Jewish movement for national liberation? Too inconvenient. 

But according to some historians, the real pivot came in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in response to PLO attacks. What started as a defensive maneuver spiraled into a grinding war. Then came the Sabra and Shatila massacre, committed by Phalangist allies but blamed on Israeli complicity. The moral high ground—held tightly since the Holocaust—began to erode.

By 1987, the First Intifada made matters worse. Palestinian children throwing stones were televised daily, and suddenly Israel—the survivor state—was cast as the overarmed occupier. “Occupation” became the dominant narrative, amplified through Western media and the budding academic left.

By the time we hit the early 2000s, Israel was being accused of apartheid by people who couldn’t find the Negev Desert on a map. In 2001, the Durban Conferenceformalized the shift. What was supposed to be a UN anti-racism conference devolved into a Jew-hating echo chamber where “Zionism equals apartheid” became institutional orthodoxy. Then came BDS, social media, viral misinformation, and the seamless fusion of anti-Zionism with every woke buzzword from the DEI handbook. 

Let’s not forget the summer of 2006. Israel was dragged into a war with Hezbollah—a genocidal, Iranian-backed terror group camped out in southern Lebanon and using civilians as shields. Western media coverage? A steady drumbeat of “both sides-ism” journalism, creating a moral equivalence between a sovereign democracy and a terrorist army whose stated goal is to eliminate that democracy. Dead Lebanese civilians were front-page news. Dead Israelis were usually buried on page ten—if mentioned at all. The BBC, now a bastion of Israel bashing, called it a “conflict” with “complex causes.” As if complexity is a substitute for judgment.

In 2014, during yet another round of Hamas-triggered violence, the shift in public discourse became fully digitized. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—each became a firehose of misinformation, out-of-context photos, and viral lies. Images of Syrian casualties were passed off as “Israeli war crimes.” Protests erupted in cities from Paris to Toronto. Synagogues were vandalized. Jews beaten in the street. All because Israel dared to respond to rockets being launched from schoolyards and hospitals.

We reached the point where the existence of Jewish grief—real grief—was seen as a threat to the dominant narrative. In 2023, when Hamas carried out the most horrific massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, killing over 1,200 civilians in southern Israel, the sympathy window lasted about 48 hours. Then came the “context.” Then came the equivocation. Then came the “yes, but occupation.” As if babies burned in safe rooms somehow bore responsibility for geopolitics.

And now we have Glastonbury 2025. Bob Vylan, a duo of self-proclaimed “Black anarchists,” gleefully chanting for the death of Jewish soldiers—many of whom are barely old enough to drink. Many of whom are women, minorities, and refugees. The crowd? Cheering like it’s a soccer match. It’s a farce, but it’s also a funeral for the moral compass of the West.

The IDF—the army that sends texts and leaflets before strikes, that operates field hospitals for its enemies, that routinely risks its own soldiers to avoid civilian deaths—is branded the world’s evil. Meanwhile, terrorist groups that behead civilians and hide behind children are seen as “resistance.” This isn’t just moral confusion. It’s inversion. It’s perversion.

The Nut-and-Yahoo Factor

But you can’t trace the decline of Israel’s global image without stopping at Benjamin Netanyahu’s office door.

Just like our orange man, his name alone is enough to turn Thanksgiving tables into war zones. For his supporters, he’s the Churchill of the Middle East, a bulldog standing between Western civilization and theocratic obliteration. For his critics, he’s a right-wing populist who turned Israel from a moral cause into a partisan wedge—domestically divisive and internationally radioactive.

In 1967, Israel’s leaders were secular, socialist war heroes. Think Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan—men of gravelly voices and gravitas, not Twitter feeds and think tank talking points. They weren’t saints, but they spoke the language of sacrifice, shared burden, and national unity. Fast forward to the Bibi era—Netanyahu’s reign began in the late ’90s, then came roaring back in the 2000s, eventually metastasizing into the longest-serving prime ministership in Israeli history.

Under Bibi, the tone changed. He didn’t invent Israeli nationalism, but he branded it—with American-style fear-mongering, evangelical alliances, and Fox News finesse. He turned Israel into a partisan football in the U.S., aligning it closely with the Republican right and alienating generations of liberal American Jews in the process. He embraced far-right coalition partners, flirted with judicial dismantling, and governed through crisis as if crisis were the point.

To many in the West—especially young progressives raised on Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—Netanyahu became the face of Israeli militarism. They didn’t see a Holocaust survivor state trying to survive in a hostile region. They saw Bibi grinning at Trump in the White House, shaking hands with Viktor Orbán, and enabling settler violence in the West Bank. They saw Gaza airstrikes but ignored the rockets. They saw occupation, not terrorism. Netanyahu became a symbol—one that obscured far more than it revealed.

But here’s the problem: symbols are sticky. Once Netanyahu became the avatar of Israel abroad, everything Israel did—every justified strike, every real security need—was viewed through the lens of Bibi. If he did it, it must be cynical. If he supported it, it must be immoral. Even October 7—when Hamas butchered babies and livestreamed it—some corners of the left framed it as “blowback” to Netanyahu’s policies. As if 1,200 dead civilians were just a political reaction, not a genocidal ideology.

And yet—Netanyahu, the nationalist king, now finds himself loathed by many in his own country. After October 7, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested his leadership. Veterans, reservists, centrists, even former Likud voters demanded accountability. It turns out that governing like a permanent campaign has consequences. You can’t tweet your way out of dead hostages and collapsed deterrence.

So when Bob Vylan took the stage in 2025 and led a crowd of thousands in a chant for the death of Israeli soldiers, it didn’t come from nowhere. It came after four decades of unspooling support, a media landscape addicted to binary heroes and villains, algorithms primed to promote pulling dead Palestinian babies out of rubble, the mainstream media propagandizing Hamas bullshit, years of Bibi’s arrogant leadership, and a generation taught that Israel is the final frontier of colonialism.

The IDF—an army that includes women, Muslims, Druze, Ethiopian Jews, and LGBTQ officers—is flattened into a caricature. Terrorist groups that literally behead civilians are hailed as “resistance.” The moral calculus is not just broken, it’s turned upside down and inside out. The more complex the truth becomes, the more aggressively the world seeks a simple lie.

But there is hope.

Despite the noise, a countercurrent is building.

Jewish students, long afraid to say the word “Zionist” out loud, are reclaiming it. Diaspora communities are waking up—not just to antisemitism on the right, but to its new, younger, trendier form on the left. They’re organizing, documenting, posting. They are saying: We are not your trope. We are not your villain. We will not disappear so you can feel morally pure.

Netanyahu, once the master of survival politics, now looks like a man out of time. And in that vacuum, something is stirring. A new generation of leaders—tired of the theatrics, hungry for unity—is emerging from the wreckage. If they succeed, they may do more than repair Israeli democracy. They may begin to restore its moral standing on the world stage.

And there are some silver linings: The same social media networks that spread lies can also spread truth. Survivors of the October 7 massacre have posted firsthand videos and testimonies that are beginning to break through the noise. Young Jews around the world—especially in the diaspora—are rediscovering their voice, their history, their identity. They are no longer content to blend into the progressive blob. They are saying, out loud and with pride: We are Zionists. Deal with it.

In places like Berlin, Paris, New York, and even London, Jews are organizing. Not to apologize. Not to explain. But to stand. And to sing. And to fight. Not with bombs or slogans, but with stories. With art. With memory. With a joy that infuriates the ideologues. They are returning to something ancient. Not just the right to self-defense, but the right to self-respect.

Topol went off to fight for Israel in 1967 and got a standing ovation. Today, a Jewish soldier does the same and gets doxxed on Instagram. But maybe the arc doesn’t just bend toward justice. Maybe it bends toward clarity—eventually. Maybe this new generation of Jews, forged in the fire of October 7 and the betrayal of Glastonbury and a thousand other Glastonburys, will find their way back to center stage. Not to beg for applause. But to demand a hearing.

And if you can’t give us that, we’ll still be here—like Tevye, fiddling on the roof of a world that’s always one pogrom away from collapse, but still managing to play something beautiful.

That’s all for the week. Have a great weekend everyone!

Brad out. 

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Shabbat shalom!

In a scorching recent essay titled “The New Populism of the Judeocidal Left,” British conservative columnist Melanie Phillips warned that Jews in Britain are now less safe than Israelis—and that’s saying something, considering Israelis just survived a 12-day war with Iran, a war that killed dozens of Israelis, and injured thousands from a barrage of a missiles and drones. The British Jewish community, she argues, is being squeezed between the resurgent far-right and an increasingly aggressive left whose anti-Zionism slips easily into antisemitism. 

Britain’s Israeli Diaspora Minister, Amichai Chikli, said that Jews were in such danger that they should leave the country and immigrate to Israel. Chikli accused the Labour Government in the United Kingdom of fueling antisemitism and claimed that its voter base consisted of “Hamas sympathisers”. He told the Daily Mail: “Without a dramatic change of course by Britain’s political leadership, I see no future for Jewish life in England.”

Yikes.

That warning isn’t just coming from across the pond anymore. If you thought New York City—a capital of global Jewish life—was immune, think again. The recent Democratic mayoral primary gave New Yorkers two radically different choices: the “ass‑grabbing hack” Andrew Cuomo, and the hyper-progressive darling Zohran Mamdani, whose record on Israel is more than just “troubling”. Much to Jewish chagrin, Mamdani’s “hyper-progressive urbanism” carried the day. 

Mamdani didn’t just flirt with anti-Israel rhetoric. He married it, moved in, and started redecorating with Hezbollah flags. He supports the BDS movement. He’s introduced bills to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if they support Israeli settlements. He called the Israeli response to Hamas attacks “genocidal,” and suggested that if Prime Minister Netanyahu visits New York, he should be arrested. Yes, arrested—for defending his country after it was attacked by a terror group that burned babies alive and livestreamed executions. I’m no fan of Nut-and-yahoo, but really?

Most chilling of all, Mamdani refused to disavow the slogan “Globalize the Intifada.”When pressed, he gave the usual weasel words about “context” and “symbolism.” This, even after Jewish leaders across the spectrum warned that intifada means blood in the streets—specifically, Jewish blood. 

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum condemned the phrase. Mamdani shrugged. 

Even if he sincerely believes the expression is a call for equal rights for Palestinians, as a public figure, he has a responsibility to acknowledge that a lot of people see it as a call for violence, and should denounce it. The New York Post put it right: if you won’t denounce a slogan that’s been used to justify bus bombings and synagogue shootings, you certainly don’t belong anywhere near Gracie Mansion.

Mamdani also refuses to concede that Israel should be an expressly Jewish state. That position, however sincerely held, was expected to cost him dearly in the most Jewish city outside the Levant. Time will tell, but it doesn’t seem so. The 33 year old has captivated young voters, with a smooth manner and sharp political instincts similar to the orange man, he’s saying what he thinks—even if it infuriates critics—and drawing disaffected voters (in this case, young people Democrats are losing) into a coalition. And like Trump, he comes from privilege and has a flair for showbiz.

New York democrats obviously wanted change. And Cuomo, the sleazy, transactional, cynical candidate—turned out to be the “moderate.” The guy who governed like a mob boss in a statehouse sauna was considered the less dangerous option. That’s the measure of our decline. To his credit, Mamdani offered answers to “how the hell can I afford to live in this City?” But I don’t buy AOC’s comment that Mamdani had “demonstrated a real ability on the ground to put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers” because the results tell a different story — here’s what happens when you sort the results by income:

Jeff Maurer, political hack and humorist, summed it up perfectly:

But evidence suggest that this grassroots movement against elites mostly appeals to…elites. Mamdani did well with high-income voters in high-income areas, especially the upwardly-mobile and highly-educated parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. And that dynamic would have been even more pronounced had Mamdani not scared away Jewish voters in Upper Manhattan with his “globalize the Intifada”comment.

It’s encouraging to see a young, vibrant and talented politician getting the dems excited again. Lord knows, someone needs to revive the dying democrat patient and the party. If you can see past his anti-Israel nonsense, and drop his inane city owned supermarkets and rent control idiocy, and combine him with more “Abundance” policies, there might be a chance for this guy to pull off an amazing victory in the fall. But the price for Jews, in my humble opinion, is too high. The risk of normalizing “from the river to the sea” and “globalizing the Intifada” would be a disaster and far too big a leap for myself, and I would think, for most Jews to take. 

Mamdani’s supporters say the allegations that he is antisemitic are blunted by the support he receives not only from organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and JFREJ, who largely align with his positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also from his relationship with Brad Lander, a longstanding and prominent Jewish elected official in the city and self-described liberal Zionist with close ties to the Jewish community.

I’m not a New Yorker, but my presumption is that for most Jewish New Yorkers, Mamdani’s victory isn’t just ideological—it’s existential. In a city once built by and for immigrants, where Yiddish once echoed through tenement walls and synagogues stood on every other block, the new left has no room for Jews who love Israel. The new lefty litmus test is loyalty to Palestine—unquestioned, absolute, and conveniently blind to Hamas rockets.

The British Jews saw it first. Now it’s landed here. And if Mamdani is the future of progressive politics in America’s most Jewish city, then Melanie Phillips was right: we are all Israelis now. 

And now, without further ajieu, here is your weekly smorgasbord of superbly selected semitic stories from sources such as The Forward, JTA, The Times of Israel, Haaretz, Nosher, Kveller, and Jewish Boston to name a few. This week I am adding a title to this section – Diaspora Dispatch – and will include my usual smarmy comments on the headlines. Enjoy.

Diaspora Dispatch:

1. 🇺🇸🇮🇱 Trump & Bibi Lock Lips on ‘Victory Party’ to Celebrate Iran Strikes – Our two favorite authoritarian bros are reportedly planning a White House meet‑and‑greet to “celebrate” their joint strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. The orange man is still gushing about how “historic” it was, while Bibi’s legal team quietly mentions “trial delay.” Just your average buddy‑fest—if your buddy is the ex-liberal world order. In a related story, the orange man took his Bibi friendship to the next level: “Cancel his corruption trial or pardon him, I’ll ‘save Bibi.’” Israeli courts weren’t impressed. Last we checked, “judicial independence” is still a thing, at least for now.
2. Latest on Iran…
   • A new poll shows a record number of U.S. voters believe America is too supportive of Israel, following American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. (JTA)
   • Trump said the U.S. and Iran will meet next week, claiming a nuclear deal is “no longer necessary” as a tentative ceasefire holds and tensions remain high. (Times of Israel)
   • Trump officials cited “new intelligence” to defend the Iran strikes as a success, while pushing back on leaked reports downplaying the impact. (Guardian)
   • Families of hostages held in Gaza are hoping the U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Iran will pressure a weakened, isolated Hamas to ease its stance in negotiations. (JTA)
   • A top Hamas official said the terrorist group is ramping up efforts to reach a new ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza. (BBC)
3. ⚖️ Texas Sued Over Ten Commandments Law, Moses Remains Unavailable for Comment – A group of Texas families and faith leaders filed a federal lawsuit over the state’s shiny new “Thou Shalt Post the Ten Commandments in Every Classroom” law. Governor Abbott said it’s about “faith and freedom,” which is Southern for “our faith, your freedom to shut up.” Plaintiffs argued the law violates church-state separation. Expect tablets to be smashed—again.(AP)
4. 🎬 Lena Dunham Returns to Netflix With “Loud Jewess Energy,” Europe Braces – Lena Dunham’s new Netflix series Too Much follows a “messy, loud, complicated Jewess” who invades London. So basically, it’s Girls, but with more self-awareness and passport stamps. Somewhere, Philip Roth is sighing and pouring a drink.(Hollywood Reporter)
5. 🏡 DOJ Ends Probe Into Muslim Suburb, Says “Jews Welcome Too, Promise” – The Justice Department dropped its investigation into a Muslim-focused housing development outside Dallas, after assurances that it would not be a no-Jews-allowed situation. The developers claimed everyone is welcome, even Reform Jews and vegans. Somewhere, Ben Shapiro’s eyebrows are twitching.(AP)
6. U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said Wednesday that more countries — some not previously expected — are likely to join the Abraham Accords, hinting at upcoming announcements. (Times of Israel)
7. 🏨 Trump Towering Over Tel Aviv? What Could Possibly Go Wrong –Trump’s name might soon grace the tallest hotel in Tel Aviv because apparently there aren’t enough real estate deals with unsettling political subtext in this region. The tower’s backers promise it’ll be “world-class” and “a beacon of luxury.” At least it’ll be easy to find on Google Maps if you’re lost and craving gold trim and indictments.

That’s all for this week. As usual, stay safe out there.

Brad out.

Shabbat shalom! 

As a Journalism/English major in college, I was required to take a course on Major British Writers where I had my first exposure to John Milton and his epic poem, Paradise Lost, which is all about the biblical fall of man. “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” he wrote. 

In 2023, Israel went from Paradise Engineered to Hell Televised. The Jewish state — long viewed by supporters as a battered miracle of survival, democracy, and grit — now finds itself cast in the role of the arch-villain in the global imagination. Not because the facts changed, but because the narrative did.

Milton understood what we’re living through: once you lose control of the story, you lose control of the meaning. And right now, Israel’s story — forged in ashes, sharpened by war, powered by democracy — is being unmade in real time.

There was a time — not long ago, but several ceasefires and hostage deals, and TikTok trends back — when Israel stood in the world’s imagination as a miracle. A scrappy little survivor state. A democracy of refugees. The tech-happy start-up nation whose army featured violinists, baristas, and reluctant engineers in uniform.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was admirable. Strong, but still wounded. Tough, but tethered to a moral compass forged in genocide. In the Jewish diaspora, it inspired a kind of complicated pride — the only country where “Jewish” wasn’t a punchline or a burden. Growing up, I remember it was customary for Jews in the US to donate money to Israel, to set aside “tzedakah” for planting trees, or for Hadassah or the United Jewish Fund. And we did so proudly, creating emotional and durable connections to the Jewish homeland. Many American Jews performed aliyah, and emigrated permanently to Israel driven by Zionist idealism and post-WWII Jewish statehood enthusiasm. Many were young, religious, or ideologically left-wing (kibbutzim).

And then came October 7.

The war in Gaza hasn’t just killed thousands and scar a region. It detonated Israel’s moral standing, especially in the West. On TikTok, in the academy, and across elite institutions, Israel is no longer David. It’s Goliath with a drone fleet. A once-revered underdog turned global pariah.

But this inversion didn’t happen on its own. It was scripted by a media industry addicted to victim porn, amplified by a propaganda machine headquartered in Gaza, and enabled by an Israeli leadership whose moral compass has been hijacked by self-preservation and far-right delusion.

If this is a battle for the soul of the Jewish story, then that story — for now — is losing.

Let’s start with what should have been clear: On October 7, Hamas launched the single most barbaric attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Babies shot in their cribs. Women raped and burned alive. Grandmothers dragged into tunnels. It was genocidal by any definition not marinated in post-colonial grad school jargon.

And yet — within days and even before Israel launched its defensive action — Western media began the great narrative inversion. ABC, NBC, and The Guardian cast doubt on the mass rapes due to “lack of photographic evidence.” Because apparently, Jewish women need to be re-traumatized in high-definition to be believed.

Then came the Al-Ahli Hospital hoax. A Palestinian rocket misfired and struck a parking lot near a hospital in Gaza. Within hours, the New York Times, BBC, and CNN blamed Israel — sourcing claims directly from Hamas. The death toll? Magically rounded to 500. No forensic verification. No skepticism. Just headlines.

When U.S. intelligence and open-source analysts confirmed the blast was self-inflicted — a terror rocket gone astray — the retractions, such as they were, were barely whispers in the back pages. But the protests had already erupted, the embassies had already been stormed, and the image of the Jewish state as hospital-bomber had been indelibly stamped on global consciousness.

And then, of course, the 14,000 babies lie — the Miltonic absurdity that deserves its own canto. In November, social media was flooded with claims that Israel would be killing 14,000 infants within 48 hours. The number was pure fiction, a grotesque aggregation of months of casualty figures, deliberately weaponized. But it went viral — reposted by journalists, influencers, and even Katie Couric. No correction. No accountability. Just the blood libel rebranded for a new generation: the Jewish state murders babies.

This isn’t media. It’s a morality play — and the Jews have been cast, again, as the devil. This is not journalism. It’s blood libel with better production values. As a former journalist inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, I am deeply appalled and embarrassed at the state of this once admirable institution. 

And yet the real genius of the narrative inversion lies with Hamas. Their propaganda machine is a masterclass in post-truth warfare. They understand the algorithm, the camera, the cadence of Western guilt. They know how the Western media works. They know tragedy sells. They know if you point a camera at a wounded child or a pile of rubble and yell “genocide,” the algorithm takes care of the rest. They know how to control the narrative — not despite Western values, but because of them. They embed weapons in hospitals, launch rockets from kindergartens, and count on Israel’s response to generate the optics they need. They’ve weaponized our empathy, our journalism, our very language. “Occupation,” “apartheid,” “genocide” — the terms no longer mean anything. They are slogans, deployed with precision to erode Israel’s moral high ground. 

And they do not fear civilian death — they rely on it. Every corpse becomes a martyr and a sermon. Every collapsed building a set piece. They flood WhatsApp channels with casualty reports (unverified, unsegregated by age, gender, or combatant status) and the media dutifully repeats them, unquestioned. Meanwhile, Israeli spokespeople hold up drone footage and talk about “precision-guided munitions” to an audience that has already stopped listening. 

But perhaps the cruelest irony is this: Jews, more than any people, carry a deep historical discomfort with justifying ourselves to those who hate us. There’s something fundamentally dehumanizing in having to prove we’re not demons. After pogroms, after the Shoah, after generations of expulsion, many Jews instinctively recoil at PR. We want to live, not explain. But in this war — this digital Eden where narrative is everything — silence gets interpreted as guilt. Dignified restraint doesn’t go viral. And moral complexity gets flattened into a single Instagram slide with a crying child and a red “Free Palestine” banner across the top.

Nowhere is the narrative collapse more devastating than among young diaspora Jews.

On American campuses, Zionism has been rebranded as white supremacy. Birthright is suspect. Shabbat dinners are canceled. DEI offices (what’s left of them) treat Jewish students as problematic, privileged extensions of the Israeli military-industrial complex. Jewish students are told they must disavow Israel to be considered “progressive” or be cast as part of the “oppressor class”.

Even within Jewish homes, there’s a schism. Older generations remember 1967. Younger ones remember a trending infographic accusing their homeland of genocide. They feel trapped — forced to choose between Jewish identity and social acceptance. Between solidarity and safety. As a result, younger generations are split: is Israel a moral homeland or a militarized embarrassment?

It’s no wonder my nephew, who was raised Jewish with a bar mitzvah in Israel, and, who attended Jewish summer camps, feels anxious about any public displays of his Jewish identity. A Jewish generation adrift. Disaffection. And in many cases, a complete severance from Zionism — not out of betrayal, but out of fatigue. 

And into this wasteland of moral confusion and generational fracture strides the embodiment of narrative collapse: Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bibi didn’t invent antisemitism. But he managed to confirm every anti-Israel stereotype while overseeing the worst security failure in Israel’s history. He dismantled judicial independence, empowered theocratic racists, ignored the military’s warnings, and governed like a Roman emperor facing indictment.

Instead of uniting the country after October 7, he weaponized grief. He let extremists stay in power. He refused to take responsibility. He made “winning” in Gaza a slogan, not a strategy. He is a man governing as if the state is a bunker built solely for his ego. He may currently be winning the war with Iran, but for many young Jews abroad, Bibi isn’t just a political liability — he’s an emotional dealbreaker. He confirms every slander, fuels every caricature. He has made it exponentially harder to defend Israel without wincing. To care without explaining. To stand with the Jewish state without having to clarify, “But not that government.”

For many diaspora Jews — even those who love Israel — he is a bridge too far. The leader who turned Paradise into parody. Who made standing with Israel feel like standing with a smirking strongman dodging subpoenas.

Regaining the Narrative

How this epic tragedy ends is beyond my speculative powers. But we need to be steadfast in our efforts to change the narrative. Israel is not a colonial project. It is not genocidal. It is not an apartheid state. But when you lose control of the story, the facts stop mattering. The world is no longer parsing your morality — it’s reacting to your image.

And when that image is shaped by enemies who seek your destruction, by journalists who outsource truth to terror ministries, and by a Prime Minister who treats the truth like a prop — the result is what Milton warned us about: a Hell made from what was once a kind of Heaven. 

But if the soul of Israel is to survive this chapter, it needs to reclaim the lost narrative. And the real question isn’t just whether Israel can win the war in Iran and Gaza, it’s whether it can reclaim the story.

Because even if the field is lost, “all is not lost; the unconquerable will…” — and in that will lies the enduring essence of Jewish peoplehood: the refusal to submit, the courage to rebuild, and the stubborn hope that even the most inverted narrative can be set right.

Because if we let our enemies — and our own failures — dictate what Israel is, then we are no longer just defending a country. We’re mourning a narrative. And narratives, once lost, are not easily resurrected.

Be safe out there.

Brad out.