PEN America’s charter holds that “literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.” Its boycott policy echoes the commitment: “political and national passions should not prevent or interrupt intellectual and cultural exchange.”

A writer is not an envoy of her government, and her work is not a communiqué from the state whose passport she carries. She enters literary exchange through her sentences and should not have to establish her politics, prove her distance from a government, or be weighed against a war in order to be read.

Yet in July 2026, PEN published a report that made the principle conditional.

The Report

“A Silent Moratorium” is drawn from interviews with more than thirty Israeli and Jewish writers, agents, translators, and editors describing a publishing world that had closed to them since October 2023.

The Jerusalem-based literary agent Deborah Harris represents dozens of leading voices of Israeli literature; her agency typically sold five to ten literary novels a year into the United States, and it has sold none since October 7, 2023. Editors she has worked with for years have stopped responding or rejected them outright, and some have asked her not to submit Israeli authors again. The standard line, she says, is that they wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now.

The writer described colleagues being fired by their editors, publishers, agents, and publicists. They are dropped, she said, without reference to any position on Israel or Zionism; they are told it is not the right time for a Jewish book. Two Israeli writers for U.S. general-interest magazines said their submissions were run through a series of ideological checks, among them whether the piece used the word “genocide”; one gave up journalism over it.

The harm is hard to name because it operates off the record: manuscripts go unread, calls go unreturned, and refusals carry no stated reason. Their accumulation suggests a pattern, yet the pattern belongs to no one in particular. As one writer told PEN, no one receives a rejection that says “We’re not going to publish this because you’re a filthy Zionist.”

The consequences extend beyond manuscripts left unpublished. Writers describe organized harassment, review-bombing, and public blacklists, including a circulating spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” that identified authors as targets for boycott. Many spoke to PEN only on condition of anonymity, fearing for their safety as well as their careers.

Political positions do not exempt Israeli and Jewish writers from exclusion and harassment. , one of the writers named in the report, has urged Israel not to “starve” civilians in Gaza and called on soldiers to refuse “immoral” orders. He is boycotted abroad regardless. Ronit Eitan, a doctoral student in creative writing, has attended protests against her government and embodies what she had long understood to be the markers of a liberal worldview. Yet, as she puts it, none of this changes the fact that she is “a Jew first for everyone else.” Joanna Chen’s essay about driving Palestinian children to medical care was retracted by Guernica after staff resigned in protest.

The Tolls

The PEN report captures all of this, but before the writers’ stories can be told, a preface exacts three tolls.

The first is grammatical asymmetry. The report describes “the horrors of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and the devastation of Israel’s war.” Hamas is identified as the author of an attack; Israel is made the owner of the war. “Israel’s war” establishes the moral frame into which the writers will enter: an account already organized around the presumption of Israel’s responsibility.

The second lies in a single word, “genocide”: the gravest charge, leveled indirectly through the authority of “human rights organizations and experts.”

The third is imposed through sequence and placement. Before the report turns to its subject, Israeli and Jewish writers, it first records the suffering of Palestinians. The placement makes the passage a condition of admission: harm to Jews may be heard only after Palestinian suffering has been acknowledged.

The irony is that this requirement reproduces the very conflation everyone disavows: Israeli writers are not their government, and Jewish writers are not Israel. Yet all the writers who follow that paragraph arrive carrying the state with them.

Before they may describe what happened to them, they are made to enter as Israel.

The Perimeter and the Resignation

On the day the report appeared, PEN amended its June 2007 “Position on Cultural and Academic Boycotts” by adding a third paragraph.

PEN had long defended boycott advocacy on free-speech grounds, notably by opposing the federal Israel Anti-Boycott Act, and had restated that position in a 2025 FAQ. The new paragraph simply made the distinction explicit: PEN saw “no contradiction between opposing boycotts ourselves, and defending the right of others to engage in them.”

The timing is telling, as is the fact that the report directed readers to PEN’s official position on cultural boycotts with the newly added language. PEN established a perimeter: while the report could document the exclusion of Israeli and Jewish writers, that documentation was not to become an argument for restricting boycott advocacy.

The amendment changed nothing about what PEN believed; it only marked the limit of what PEN was prepared to let the report mean.

Within days of the report’s publication, PEN’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, resigned.

Mengestu feared that, by presenting the exclusion of Israeli writers as discrimination, the report could be used to justify restrictions on boycott advocacy. PEN therefore had to consider, he argued, whether its own work might “restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech.”

The amendment should have assuaged the concern. Mengestu nevertheless believed that publication itself created the risk, and the perimeter PEN had drawn was not enough.

Israeli and Jewish harm could be documented, but not acknowledged: it entered only once its political uses had been anticipated and contained.

The Strudel

PEN’s report documented the consequences of conflating Israeli and Jewish writers with the Israeli state, yet allowed the same concern with political implication to shape its own framing. The writers were judged by the political positions assigned to them; the report was judged by how its findings might be used rather than by what it actually argued. Mengestu resigned rather than remain tied to that possible use

Keret wrote about the affair on his Substack. Neither man is a victim, he concedes; the suffering in Gaza and Israel far exceeds a novelist’s trouble publishing a book. Yet Keret gives impassioned interviews and Mengestu “demonstratively resigns,” as though either gesture could decide the fate of the world.

Keret tells a story about his mother, a Holocaust survivor who used to play Wagner records in the evenings in Ramat Gan. One night a neighbor heard the music and objected: she couldn't play an antisemite's music in front of the children.

He's also dead, his mother said. The neighbor pressed — the Nazis loved his music.

So they loved it, she answered; they loved apple strudel too. Should she stop eating apples?

Last Sunday at the Montreal airport, a stranger asked where I was headed, and I said Vienna. It was true the way the easier thing is true: I was changing planes in Vienna and flying straight on to Tel Aviv. The word Israel stayed in my mouth. Saying the easier thing took so little effort that I barely registered the choice.

I was traveling to Haifa, to a conference where, for four days, every aspect of contemporary antisemitism from every corner of the world was tackled — and where we launched the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association (CASA), spearheaded by sociologist David Hirsh, who has been drawing this map since almost nobody wanted to admit the territory existed. The association is a partnership spanning Gratz College in the United States, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and the Comper Center at the University of Haifa. This is my field. I came to it through curiosity and study. And then, for some of us, October 7 clarified that this was now an active condition, and we had a real research problem on our hands.

There were dinners and wine with colleagues from Austria, Germany, Britain, France, and beyond. The most honest thing I can report from all of it: none of us pretended to have the answers. What we have is humility, a commitment to rigor, and a willingness to work together, which turns out to be a research method.

Four days later, at Ben Gurion Airport, I chatted with an older couple on the first leg of the trip home, Tel Aviv to Vienna, and then on to Chicago. Somewhere over Turkey, the woman told me about her last trip to Chicago to see her daughter. In a café in Chicago, a young man had asked where she was from, and she said Germany. She is Israeli. She told me she still felt ashamed of the answer, and I told her the most important thing is that she protects herself. She is my mother’s age. I knew the shame she meant because I had felt a smaller version of it in Montreal and filed it under convenience.

For the rest of the flight I sorted the four days.

The night before I left, had closed the conference under the stage lights, looking tired. I had seen him speak a year or so ago when he came to Ohio State, and I remembered the force of him; the tiredness seemed new.

Fifty years ago, Lévy told us, he wrote that antisemitism moves like a virus, mutating its wording with each generation, and that its next wording would be Israel. Everyone asks whether antizionism is antisemitism, he said, and the question runs the wrong direction. The old fuels are spent: nobody assembles a mob anymore over deicide, or over Voltaire’s contempt for the people who produced Christianity, or over the racial pseudoscience of the nineteenth century. Ask instead whether antisemitism today can be anything other than antizionism. Convince the world that the Jewish state commits apartheid and genocide, that Jews everywhere are complicit, and millions can hate in good conscience.

He had toured the American campuses to see it up close — protesters chanting the slogans, Jewish students keeping Shabbat with fear in their bellies. The protesters, he said, were no worse than he had been at their age. They believed they were defending the weakest people on earth. Their hatred spoke the vocabulary of love, and he said the encounter chilled him in a way fifty years of writing about the subject had spared him.

That morning a journalist had asked him whether French Jews should emigrate as their grandparents should have in the thirties. To go where, he answered. In the thirties there was America; there was the Yishuv, the Jewish community building a homeland in British Mandate Palestine before statehood in ‘48. Today the wave is worldwide.

And when the sexual atrocities of October 7 came up on stage, he named their reception: “the will not to know.” Real academics, great teachers, had looked him in the eye after the evidence was public and said they did not believe, or that it was not without context. In France, in America, in the UN. Beside him on stage sat Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who had spent those same two years assembling the most comprehensive documentation of those crimes.

And still, after all of it, Lévy expressed hope and optimism. I didn’t hear it as his though; I heard it as an act of transfer. He was passing a torch to the rows in front of him, trusting that my colleagues and I would carry the ideas that matter, would serve as a weight when the world spins with algorithms too fast for anyone to steer.

The ideas he was trusting us with were the ones I discovered as a girl in Ohio. I was fifteen when I first saw the black-and-white photograph of Hannah Arendt leaning over a desk — a woman thinking for a living, the thought visible on her face. I understood something I could hardly have phrased then: ideas were a place a person could live. They could matter more than the room you stood in, the town, the decade. A girl in Ohio could belong to them, and they would have her.

Days earlier, in a lecture hall in Haifa, sociologist Karin Stögner had given the talk that returned me to that moment when I learned the name of these ideas. Critical theory began in Frankfurt in the 1920s and ‘30s as a refusal to take society at its own word — a way of asking how domination survives inside categories that feel natural, and of keeping thought supple enough to catch it. By 1940, Adorno and Horkheimer had placed antisemitism at the center of the inquiry: the hatred that makes a complicated world feel simple, that bridges the contradictions of modern life by giving them a face.

Early in her talk, Stögner addressed Nancy Fraser’s essay, “Gaza as World Event,” which argues that the Holocaust-centered moral order governing the West for half a century is in crisis — that Gaza now “bids to replace” Auschwitz as the era’s symbol of atrocity. It is a sweeping essay, a travelogue through Germany, America, world Jewry, Japan. And in every location it makes the same discovery. Jews who testify to antisemitism are exercising power: their testimony arrives pre-labeled as a weapon, a pretext, an instrument of repression. Jews who renounce Israel carry a purer Judaism and inherit the great universalist line — Spinoza, Heine, Freud, Arendt. Across the essay's pages, antisemitism wears quotation marks whenever someone claims to fight it; threats to Jews, the essay declares, are exaggerated where they exist at all; once, in parentheses, its rise on the far right is conceded.

October 7 appears nowhere. Hamas appears once, in scare quotes, as an example of unfair conflation. The women of that morning — the ones whose violation Cochav spent two years documenting — are absent. A world event, narrated at length, with its first morning missing.

The older woman from Ben Gurion Airport, the one who had said “Germany,” changed her answer because she anticipated its reception. Fraser’s essay is the reception — it announces in advance what Jewish testimony will mean. A frame arranged that way has assigned every Jewish voice its meaning before it speaks: confirmation counts as witness; challenge counts as weaponization. It can absorb anything — a massacre, an investigation, a survivor — and convert each into further evidence for itself. The will not to know, given a bibliography.

Karin Stögner’s verdict on the essay was that it was apologetic, and she meant the word in its strict sense. Fraser observes, accurately, that for many “Gaza” now displaces “Auschwitz,” and then proceeds to defend the displacement. The critical move would have been to name the untruth within the fact: substitutions of this kind happen, and they can still be false. Fraser supplies their justification instead. And so, Stögner concluded, she can no longer count as a critical theorist.

I would go further. Ideas held open remain theory. Ideas captured become ideology. Ideology begins when the world loses the ability to answer back.

Arendt on Fraser’s list stopped me. She is the same Arendt from my photograph — the one who practiced what she called thinking “without a banister,” who distrusted every framework that knew the answer before the question. A framework that assigns Jewish testimony its meaning in advance is banister from wall to wall. That lineage belongs to whoever keeps the questions open.

Stögner kept them open, and watching her do it was watching critical theory practiced in the spirit it was written. She began where Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik began in the 1940s: ideologies rarely travel alone — antisemitism, sexism, racism, and nationalism arrive as a syndrome, each reinforcing the others. From that finding she has built an intersectionality of ideologies, the concept restored to the meaning Kimberlé Crenshaw gave it: a lens for what single categories erase. Antisemitism confounds every framework built on stable categories because it fixes Jews nowhere. The antisemite’s Jew is capitalist and communist, effeminate and domineering, rootless and secretly sovereign — a figure assembled to embody the dissolution of boundaries, the threat to unity as such. A framework that sorts the world into privileged and oppressed meets that figure, files Jews under privilege, and hands the oldest stereotype an anti-racist certificate.

That was the difference between the essay and the talk, and it is the whole difference. Fraser deploys the categories; Stögner asks what the categories conceal. And her answer reached October 7 itself: antisemitism braided with misogyny, both fueled by intolerance of ambiguity, both enraged by bodies that cross assigned lines — the Jew imagined as dissolver of boundaries, the female Israeli soldier as a scandal against womanhood itself. Read that way, the sexual violence of that morning enacted the ideology’s deepest demand: Jews and women forced back into their assigned places through absolute domination of the body. Cochav’s report and Stögner’s theory describe the same event from two directions, evidence and explanation meeting in the middle.

The meeting happened in person, too. After Karin’s talk I found Cochav in the crowd, and we hugged for the first time. For over two years I had cheered her on from Ohio — watching her assemble the record, posting about what she was building, understanding that one of the most important documentations of our time was taking shape in her hands.

She knew who I was; she had felt the support and understood I was tracking every step. I told Karin her talk gave me goosebumps. “Same here,” Cochav said. We had tears in our eyes, but our tears carried the opposite of grief. That is what a theory that holds can do: it gives the thing that happened to you a shape, and a name, and company. We walked out of that room empowered, both of us, and said so.

I told another colleague in Haifa that I had felt betrayed by the feminist thinkers whose books taught me how to think. The feeling came early and it came hot. What I understand now is that the only people they betrayed were themselves. The ideas belong to everyone; that was always the point. The tradition lives in whoever keeps applying it honestly — including against the institutions that claim to own it. And if anything, their disbelief should stand as the object of adjudication. Because a framework’s claim to analytical power depends on its willingness to apply that power reflexively. The testimony has been delivered — Cochav saw to that. What the framework does with it is the test.

Which is what made the company in Haifa extraordinary — the Germans and Austrians most of all. For them the “genocide” label arrives with a gift attached. Accept it, and the ledger balances: if the descendants of the victims commit the crime of the century, the descendants of the perpetrators are released from theirs. The offer stands in every faculty meeting and every feuilleton, and it costs one word. They refuse it. They come to Haifa instead and say: everyone around me is saying this, and it is wrong. They have no guarantee of jobs afterward. There may be no place for any of us inside what currently calls itself the academy. It would be so easy for them to say the easier thing and go home absolved.

An older vocabulary had a name for that courage: righteous among the nations. The term is too large for a conference room, but the shape of the courage is the same — knowing in your gut what is true and acting on it. Watching them pour each other wine, I kept thinking, “They have no idea how extraordinary they are.”

Before she slept, the woman beside me asked what I want to do when the PhD is finished. I told her the truth, which is that I have never known less. I have also never been more certain that what I am doing is exactly what I should be doing.

For years I worried about the past and holding on to the old world, the memories, my heritage. I see now that tomorrow needs the worry more. But the two feed each other — Walter Benjamin’s insight, that the past survives through a present willing to turn toward it, and the present knows itself only through what it inherits. If the past two and a half years gave one gift, it is clarity: knowing who is who, where they stand, where you belong — and staying open as the walls shift, flexible enough to evolve with them. That is the dialectic. That is critical theory, lived. Nobody can take it from us.

The torch has left the older hands. The plane began its descent toward Vienna. Beside me sat a woman my mother’s age who had learned to say Germany. Somewhere in Ohio, a girl was looking at a photograph. I sat between them, carrying the name and the ideas together.

Hours later, in Chicago, changing terminals for the last leg home, I shared a shuttle bus with a young Black couple headed to New York for the Jay-Z concert at Yankee Stadium. She was worried they’d get in too late to buy Yankees merch before the show, and I assured her she could grab a tee at LaGuardia, and she was happy. She told me she teaches fifth-grade math. I told her my son is going into fifth grade and I couldn’t do his homework if my life depended on it.

We had been talking like that a while when they asked what kind of conference I was flying home from. “Antisemitism,” I said — the whole word, out loud, in the city where the woman on the plane had once said “Germany.”

They asked what I had learned.

“We’re fucked,” I joked, and they laughed.

Then I answered honestly. “That we all need to slow down. Pause before we leap to our interpretations.”

They nodded and said how much they liked that.

The bus rolled on between terminals.

My brother posted something on Facebook about a fundraiser for Don Leonard, the Democratic nominee in Ohio’s 15th Congressional District. So I did my homework and read up on his campaign, and passed along what I found.

At first the homework went well. On paper Leonard is everything you would want a candidate to be. He served in the Peace Corps, spent a decade teaching at Ohio State, and is running a campaign about wages, childcare and housing. I liked him.

And then I watched him talk about Israel.

In his April 2026 interview with local political blogger D.J. Byrnes (“The Rooster”), Leonard, who won his primary with nearly 53 percent of the vote, begins exactly where a careful person should — he hedges. He invokes his international-relations training, weighs “act of war” against “crimes against humanity” against “genocide.”

In those early statements, you could nod along, because nothing seems unreasonable, but by the end, Leonard has traveled from cautious distinctions to the claim that Israelis are running a Warsaw ghetto. His route is so smooth that the distance covered never has to be acknowledged, least of all by an interviewer who shares the destination and helps him toward it.

The Proximate Jew as Alibi

“What brings me clarity is that my Jewish wife is telling me, yes, it is a genocide, right? Yes, it’s an apartheid state.”

Perhaps Leonard’s wife has reasons for her conclusion, such as things she has read or evidence she has weighed, but we never hear those reasons. Leonard introduces her as a credential, relying on her Jewishness to settle the question.

Imagine if she had said that it is not a genocide, and not an apartheid state — would Leonard say so?

I imagine not.

Because the “yes, it is a genocide” is received as a Jew bravely testifying against the interests of her own tribe; the “no” would be received as a Jew protecting it.

The same Jewishness that made his wife a witness would, in a sentence, be perceived as the bias that disqualifies her. A genuine authority points both ways and can be believed both ways. One that counts only while it agrees with you is a credential summoned to bless a conclusion already reached.

This maneuver keeps popping up: the proximate Jew as alibi.

First, the conclusion that comes before anything else, and then a Jew who confirms it is produced as proof. Meanwhile, a Jew who would dissent is neither sought nor believed. The function is exculpatory: it jumps ahead of the accusation it expects — “you think I'm being antisemitic” — and disarms it in advance.

I see it regularly on my Facebook feed. Liberal friends and acquaintances share an image of Bernie Sanders over one of his lines about Netanyahu or Gaza, and the sharing does something the words alone would not. Sanders is the most recognizable Jewish face on the American left, and the implicit caption is: “a Jew said it, so I’m in the clear.” His Jewishness is conscripted to pre-acquit the person clicking “share.”

Suppose a candidate announced he would vote against immigrant rights, and reasoned that his immigrant wife agrees with him. We would call it out instantly, and argue that her status is not an argument and producing her does not make a position justified (a spouse’s identity proves that the speaker is married, nothing more). The only reason this passes when the subject is Jews and Israel is because the maneuver has become reflexive.

A Jew vouching for a charge against Jews has been made to feel like proof instead of what it is, which is an alibi.

And here is what should trouble a Democrat watching another Democrat do this. Leonard holds a PhD in government from Cornell; he is a man who tells us movingly that he became “pro-Israeli” at thirteen, weeping over a Holocaust book, undone by the discovery that adults would sit back and let it happen.

Don Leonard is exactly the kind of person the phrase “should know better” was built for — a thoughtful man who said these things casually, as if they had been set out in advance for him to pick up.

The ease of his words is the scandal.

The Relay to “Yes”

If you listen carefully, you’ll notice that throughout the interview the escalation to “yes, it’s a genocide” happens as a relay — each speaker handing the next a license to go further.

Leonard says he has “admiration” for IDF soldiers, who are conscripts “being ordered to do horrific things.” This is a defensible sentiment, sympathy for conscripts in any war. But notice how the interviewer takes the handoff: “The ‘I’ve been ordered—just taking orders.’ It didn’t work out for the Nazis.”

There it is, set on the table — Nuremberg and the defense that famously failed there.

I expected Leonard to push it away, but he didn’t: “We know from Nuremberg that it’s no defense. We know from the Geneva Convention on War that it’s not a defense.”

So the frame is now jointly held and Israeli soldiers stand where the Nazi defendants stood, and the only live question is whether individual conscripts can plead duress. Leonard did not introduce the analogy, but affirming it is its own kind of authorship.

The same relay goes for the apartheid charge.

Leonard hedges: Israel is “teetering right on the absolute brink of converging with South Africa in terms of being an apartheid state.”

Teetering. On the brink. Converging. Three words of distance, and the interviewer spends all three at once: “I would say it is.”

Then, they bond over it — “and nuclear weapons either,” the interviewer adds, riffing while Leonard never reclaims the ground he’d carefully marked off a sentence earlier. The hedge meant something when he said it: it marked a limit Leonard was not yet willing to cross… and it evaporated the moment the interviewer offered to cross it for him, and Leonard let the harder claim stand as if it had been his all along.

This is what permission structures look like from the inside. One speaker advances to a line and stops, and then the other crosses it. The first does not retreat; net motion: forward, every time, with no single person ever quite responsible for the distance covered.

The Inversion

Mid-sentence, inside a complaint about settlements, Leonard invokes the most extreme comparison available to a human being:

“Imagine how much it pisses me off when I see them treating the settlement — the Palestinian communities in the West Bank — like the ghettos in Warsaw. And now the Jewish people are being turned into the occupiers.”

He does not pause or seem to hear himself, and with no more effort than a man landing on the nearest word, he surfaces Jews as the new Nazis. This sentence that turns the descendants of the murdered into the murderers costs him nothing to say, and he says it while feeling tender.

He could have said so many other things — colonialism, occupation, and South African apartheid were all on the table, invoked just minutes earlier. But he went past all of them to the Warsaw Ghetto, and placed Jews in the role of their own exterminators — the West Bank as the ghetto, the Israelis as the SS, the Palestinians as the Jews of 1943.

This is antisemitism in one of its most recognizable modern forms: Holocaust inversion, in which the victims are reassigned the role of perpetrators and the perpetrators’ crime is turned against them. This is not a claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Criticism of Israeli policy, including harsh criticism, is not antisemitic as such. The problem begins when that criticism takes the form of Nazi comparison, making the Holocaust itself the instrument by which Jewish action is condemned. The line is not subtle, and Leonard walked across it. The word antisemitism deserves to be said here, because the structure of the interview depends on keeping it out.

None of this required malice. Someone speaking from open hatred knows the sentence is ugly and says it anyway; Leonard does not appear to know. He arrived at it on a feeling of decency, the way you settle into a conviction you have held so long you no longer remember learning it.

Let me grant him everything a fair reader should. The suffering in Gaza is vast and a person of conscience watching it has every reason to be sickened; I take Leonard’s horror to be sincere. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is the point. Genuine horror at human suffering does not license the one comparison that turns Jews into Nazis to express it. That a man feels the suffering sincerely is how the oldest structure finds his mouth — not despite his conscience, but through it.

Leonard’s Evidence

The Film
The inversion is bracketed by sincerity. Just before it, the weeping thirteen-year-old; just after it, The Gatekeepers — the documentary in which every surviving former chief of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, is interviewed on camera.

The Shin Bet officers are made to stand in for an argument they did not make. In the film, they warn that the occupation endangers Israel. This is a security warning, with nothing in it about genocide or Warsaw ghettos. A documentary is a film with a thesis and an edit, not an evidentiary record, and a candidate who treats one as the foundation for a war-crimes determination is telling you how he reasons.

The UN
The same goes for the UN. A candidate who invokes “UN investigations” as a seal of reliability should be able to say which UN body he means, what authority it carries, and what its report actually establishes.

The finding he is leaning on comes from an independent Commission of Inquiry — a body that, as Reuters notes, does not officially speak for the United Nations — and “the UN said so” does far more rhetorical work in his mouth than the underlying document can bear. Someone who has done his homework knows the difference; someone performing a conclusion only needs the institution’s name to nod along, and Leonard reaches for it the second way.

The Clinic
The IVF clinic is the clearest case of the same habit, because here you can watch an uncertain record calcify into a settled fact in the space of a sentence. Leonard tells it cleanly: an Israeli tank fired a shell into a clearly marked fertility clinic and destroyed four thousand embryos, and that act of preventing future Palestinian generations is what makes it genocide.

Look at what actually stands under that.

The UN Human Rights Council made the Al-Basma clinic a centerpiece of its September 2025 genocide report, and the report rests on a single ABC News article published more than four months after the supposed December 2023 strike.

In that reporting the clinic’s own embryologist says plainly that he does not know whether the lab was deliberately targeted, and Israel says it has no record of the specific strike. No fragments were recovered and no trajectory or forensic analysis was done. The Commission itself does not claim certainty; it says the clinic was “most probably” hit by an Israeli shell. Out of that — a secondhand account, an unfixed date, the lab’s own staff disavowing knowledge of intent, a “most probably” — Leonard builds a deliberate, intent-laden act of genocide and states it as fact. The weakest link in the chain becomes the thing he is surest of, because the charge has no weight without it.

Consider it as a military proposition for a moment, since Leonard invokes his international-relations training. To destroy embryos on purpose, you would send a tank and its crew into a contested building, spend the intelligence required to locate the one room holding the nitrogen tanks, and fire a single precise round. Why would a state do that — one that could level the structure from the air or kill more people with that same round than the strike destroyed embryos? The means contradict the motive, and a campaign to extinguish a people’s future would choose almost any other method over this one.

Leonard does not pause on any of this, because pausing would cost him the conclusion.

The Definition
Notice, too, what the same fact is made to mean as the subject changes.

When Israel fired the shell, the embryos were a prevented generation, lives whose destruction makes the act genocidal — vivid enough that Leonard invokes his own IVF-conceived daughter to feel their loss. A breath later, attacking Mike Carey’s abortion politics, the same frozen embryos are reproductive material a woman must remain free to discard.

This is not an argument about abortion; it is about evidentiary elasticity. The embryo’s moral status is not fixed and then reasoned from — it is set, each time, by which reading damns the party Leonard has already chosen to damn. That is the architecture in miniature: the conclusion fixed first, the facts assigned afterward to fit.

So, step back and look at what Leonard offers as the basis for the gravest charge in international law. A documentary, his wife, a single incident at an IVF clinic (which he uses to redefine genocide so the definition fits), and “UN investigations by independent UN agencies,” which he cites as though the phrase settled the matter.

A Man Who Knew Better, Once Before

None of this began with Leonard, and the structure he stepped into was poured long before there was an Ohio congressional race for him to win or lose.

To see it clearly, it helps to find it somewhere far enough away that no one’s current loyalties are at stake — in a man who loved his own country exactly as much as Leonard means well, and who fell into the same trap attempting to defend it.

On a single day in July 1941, in the German-occupied Polish town of Jedwabne, hundreds of the town’s Jews were rounded up and driven into a barn that was then set on fire. For half a century the Germans were blamed, and a monument even said so. Then in 2000, the historian Jan Tomasz Gross published Neighbors, which exposed the killers as the Jews’ own Polish neighbors.

Gross’s book forced Poland to confront that ordinary Poles had murdered their Jewish townsmen with their own hands. One of the country’s most respected wartime historians, Tomasz Strzembosz, became a prominent scholarly voice in the public roundtable that convened on the massacre. He argued that Gross had gone too far.

The two men share almost nothing. Strzembosz was a resistance veteran defending the self-image of his own nation; Leonard never served and has no national myth of his own at stake. Their lives do not rhyme, and I am not claiming they do. I am claiming something about the discourse that operates through both of them — the way certain gestures become available to educated, well-meaning people and are taken up almost without decision, in voices that could not be more different.

At that roundtable the moderator tried to hand Strzembosz the conclusion directly: hadn’t he suggested the killing might have been revenge for Jewish collaboration?

He refused it: “I never said that,” he answered. “I do not link the burning of the Jews in Jedwabne to what happened there before.”

Strzembosz would not say the one sentence that turns the murdered into the authors of their own murder. Yet while he refused the utterance, he would proceed to build the entire case around the belief that the Jews wronged the Poles and got what was coming.

Auschwitz and Majdanek survivor Israel Gutman read Strzembosz’s article and named what it was doing. When Strzembosz replied to Gutman, he opened by insisting he did not wish to justify any crime against Jews; then, he spent the rest of the letter doing just that by repeating the old charge that the Jews had welcomed the Soviet occupiers and helped ship Poles off to Siberia.

Strzembosz also found an alibi in Jan Karski, a Polish hero honored for trying to save Jews during the war. He quoted Karski saying that Jews had informed on Poles.

Now set Leonard beside that.

Strzembosz’s unimpeachable witness, produced to license the accusation, decades before a Jewish wife in Ohio.

Offered the Nazi frame by a friendly interviewer — “just following orders didn’t work out for the Nazis” — Leonard took the handoff.

When the interviewer offered to take it further, he let his disclaimer-first structure go — the teetering, the brink — and the harder apartheid claim stood as if it had been his all along. The Warsaw ghetto came from him alone.

As with Strzembosz, “righteous” witnesses were pressed into service — the Shin Bet chiefs of The Gatekeepers, the Jewish wife — each one a “Karski,” summoned to prove the man could not possibly mean what he was saying. This is how distortion gets coated in the certainty that what is happening has something to do with conscience.

Again, these are different men with different motives: Strzembosz was defending the honor of his nation against a wound to its self-image. His permission came from a politics of memory in which “the Jews had it coming” was the comfortable answer, and even declining to say the worst part out loud cost him something with his own side. Leonard is a candidate trying to walk a thin line into office. His permission comes from a primary coalition in which the genocide charge is the applauded position, the safe one, the thing that earns a nod from the voters he needs.

But when you strip away the biographies, the same structure remains — assign the Jew the role of power, invert victim and perpetrator, let the disclaimer trail the damage. Once it was filled with the old Polish myth of the Jew as Soviet collaborator, now it’s filled with Netanyahu’s Israel. Each time, the narrative is taken up by a sincere man who feels he reasoned his way to it, and how far he goes has nothing to do with his decency, only with what refusing would cost him.

The Hard Thing

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a piece about one candidate’s bad afternoon on a podcast. The candidate is almost incidental.

What Leonard’s interview documents is how antisemitism hides in plain sight — genocide, apartheid, and Nazi comparison assembled so frictionlessly that a sincere liberal can lay all three on a Jewish state in a single sitting and feel himself growing more moral as he does it.

I am not going to tell Leonard’s coalition they should be afraid of this, because they will not believe me. They do not see themselves as people who traffic in antisemitism; they see themselves as the opposite, and a warning that they are becoming the thing they oppose slides off a self-image like that without leaving a mark.

So I will ask something else of them instead:

Set aside whether this costs you Jewish voters. Ask the simpler thing: is this who you want to be — the kind of person who takes the comparison that turns Jews into Nazis because the room is nodding?

Because here is what history actually teaches: There were very few Righteous Gentiles, and the reason there were few is that it was never easy. To see the structure for what it is while everyone around you calls it something else, and then to refuse it at a cost to yourself has always been the hard thing, the thing almost no one does.

Strzembosz is what the common path looks like: a decent, learned man who never saw it, who built the case and came away feeling wronged. Leonard is on that same path over two decades later, a different myth in his mouth and the same certainty that he is being reasonable. Both had every tool to see it and didn’t — because for each of them the charge was the rewarded thing and refusing it was the thing that cost. That is the apparatus, and it is running again — on a ballot, in Ohio, now.

My brother will vote for Leonard, and so will my mother. He is running against a Republican who backs Trump, so they will vote blue because they believe the alternative is worse. This is the bind a lot of Jewish voters are in right now, and Leonard is counting on it — counting on people like my family who feel they have no other choice.

I am in another district, and I will tell you honestly that I do not know what I would do in their place.

On November 5, 2025, New Yorkers woke to the result they had chosen: Zohran Mamdani had won. He had won on affordability — rent, transit, wages, and the cost of life in the most expensive American city. But the exit polls registered something stranger. Two-thirds of voters said the candidates’ positions on Israel had factored into their decision, and thirty-eight percent called those positions a major factor.

For a mayoral race in New York City.

The job is the MTA, the NYPD, the schools, the rent, the rats, the parking, and the snow. There is no Israel desk or foreign policy portfolio for that matter. And yet, on the issue with the least to do with the job, two of every three voters had taken a position and acted on it.

Eight months later, on June 23, 2026, three candidates aligned with Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in New York. Unlike the mayoral race, these elections matter for Israel. As members of Congress, the elected candidates will cast votes on aid, sanctions, and resolutions. We do not yet know whether their position on Israel decided any of the races, as they differed by district, opponent, constituency, and local terrain. What we do know is that each winning campaign treated opposing Israel as politically advantageous; each winning candidate had charged their opponent with enabling Israel’s “genocide” against Palestinians.

Israel policy is the subject of ongoing disagreement among Democrats, and more recently Republicans. The debates draw on specifics, such as how much military aid, on what conditions, with what oversight; whether to recognize a Palestinian state and when; how to position the United States toward settlement expansion. A congressional candidate running against an incumbent on Israel could have addressed any of these positions, but none of the winning candidates did. Instead, they insisted their opponents enabled “genocide.”

The question is: why?

The charge converted a matter of foreign policy into a matter of local moral standing. Political economists call this “expressive voting”: a choice whose value lies in the act and its audience rather than its result, and which, as Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings observe, comes to dominate wherever the action itself is inconsequential and the price of taking the position is low. A vote on Israel cast in a New York primary changes little in Gaza and much in the eyes of the voter’s own coalition.

The records of the defeated tell the story better than the charge did. Adriano Espaillat, ousted in the 13th, was a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a champion of affordable housing, immigrant rights, and labor — the very issues his opponents claimed to run on. Dan Goldman backed reproductive rights, a higher minimum wage, universal childcare, and paid family leave. What separated them from the candidates who beat them was Israel. As the writer Elissa Wald put it, the incumbents’ fatal mistake was being pro-Israel, “and it would seem that nothing else mattered.”

When the Vote Becomes a Moral Signal

In a mayoral election, when voters cast ballots on questions the office cannot meaningfully address, the vote’s political function exceeds its practical effect. The voter may experience herself as responding to Gaza, and she may be responding sincerely; an expressive choice can be a heartfelt one. In New York, this response functions as a declaration of identity. It signals by telling other people — the electorate, her peers, even herself — who she is.

This is why her position must be visible through the post, the sign, the chant, and even the vote. What she wants is to be recognized, be read as one of them, and be on the right side of the line they draw. These are the forms through which the position becomes socially real. Philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call this “moral grandstanding,” the use of moral speech to raise one’s standing. They note its built-in escalation, how once someone stakes out the stronger condemnation, the rest must match it or be left looking like naysayers. In a coalition that reads silence as a position, to go unplaced is to be suspect by default.

So the display tells her neighbors where she stands before anyone can decide she stands elsewhere — with the oppressed against the powerful, with the insurgent against the establishment, with the innocent against the guilty.

The subject is Gaza, but the sorting happens in New York.

Far From the War, Close to the Jew

The ordinary work of government cannot easily be made into a drama of innocence and guilt. The MTA resists the form, as do parking, sanitation, and snow removal. Israel works because it meets three conditions: it is distant enough that the voter does not bear the consequences, familiar enough that she knows how to read it, and unresolved enough that it can be used again.

This logic operates on the American left. The conflict’s costs are paid every day by people who cannot vote in New York City, while its symbolic weight is harvested by people who can. The voter speaks of decolonization, but the Palestinians she speaks for are not really the point — they are the material she uses to show who she is. The cause is invoked, the people are not consulted, and a coalition that calls itself anti-colonial treats its own subject as something to be spoken for rather than heard from.

In 2025, the Israel position that animated 38% of New York’s voters cost most of them nothing. They had never been to Israel or Palestine, had no Israeli or Palestinian relatives, and stood at a conversational distance from anyone whose life the position would touch.

So the distance holds in one direction. The voter is far from the conflict she invokes, but the power she opposes is imagined as near. When the imagined source of that power is remote, the hostility travels to whoever stands close enough to answer for it. In New York, that proximity is assigned to the local Jew, who bears no relation to Israeli policy and is drafted into the slot of the aggressor regardless.

The mechanism is old.

Freud described how a group can “bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness,” and the psychoanalytic literature on antisemitism, from Otto Fenichel onward, treats the Jew as the figure onto whom a displaced hostility is projected because the particulars of Jewish life “make them suitable for such a projection.”

The displacement is social before it is anything else. The voter reaches for a distant conflict at little personal cost, while the local Jew absorbs it at close range.

The Coalition Finds Its Enemy

While the conflict does identity work for the individual, it does organizing work for the coalition.

A movement recognizes itself through what it opposes, so it needs a shared enemy: someone outside its own membership that the whole coalition can stand against and, in standing against, recognize itself. A target drawn from within fractures the coalition; one drawn from outside holds it together.

The left had tried the internal version. For a while its organizing principle was a reckoning with whiteness — an examination in which members were asked to locate the oppressor in themselves, to name their own complicity, to sit with their privilege. As moral instruction it was powerful, but as a unifier it worked against itself. An object placed inside the coalition divides it, because everyone inside falls under the same scrutiny. The reckoning turned members’ attention toward one another and toward themselves, and a movement cannot easily cohere around a demand that each of its members answer for the thing it opposes.

But an external object resolves this. When the figure to be opposed stands outside the coalition — powerful, distant, and elsewhere — the scrutiny that had turned inward can be redirected outward where it unifies instead of divides.

Trump did this with the caravan in 2018. A group of Central American migrants moving north through Mexico existed, but the urgency Trump attached to them did not. The caravan became a fixed point onto which his coalition could project itself. Stand against it and you were one kind of person; stand with it and you were another. The actual migrants became secondary to the story told about them — like the Palestinians, their purpose was to carry a coalition’s sense of itself.

What Trump’s coalition opposed sat at the border and out of reach. What Mamdani’s coalition opposes has a local address: the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

For many New York Jews the conflict abroad is family, history, theology, the question of whether a relative came home from October 7. Mamdani’s victory was, among other things, the announcement that the cost of that victory would now be theirs to absorb. They will live with the mayor who declined to say that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, who vowed to arrest Netanyahu should he visit the city, singling out the Israeli prime minister from every other head of state he might have named.

The Conflict Came Pre-Labeled

Other distant conflicts, such as Tigray, Sudan, Xinjiang, and Myanmar are familiar enough to register, but that is not enough. The American left has no labels for them because its signature distinction is colonizer and colonized, and these wars do not divide that way.

Sudan is an Arab-led government against African populations, with no Western power to cast as the villain; Tigray is Ethiopian against Ethiopian; Xinjiang would mean siding against China, which reads as siding with American power, the wrong direction. Ask who the good side is in any of them and you get a pause because this requires reading up.

But Israel-Palestine comes pre-labeled: a Western-backed, white-coded state against a brown, indigenous people. The fact that more than half of Israeli Jews are Black and brown does not disturb the label, because the label was never meant to describe — only to convict.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the vilification of “the Zionist” supply a reading far older than the conflict itself.

The figure of the Jew as powerful, foreign, and dominant by hidden means runs back centuries — through the moneylender, the conspirator, and the secret hand behind events. The American left’s colonial frame runs on opposition, and without an oppressor to name, there is no side to take and no virtue in taking it. So the frame finds one. Israel did not have to audition for this role — the casting was a story about Jews before it was a story about Israel. And of course, the voter does not register this story as antisemitic; she believes she is opposing power, and opposing power is the one thing she is sure is right.

The Cost Lands in New York

A mayoral election should belong to the city, and in part the 2025 race did — Mamdani won it on affordability. But that was the governance half. He won the other half by giving the coalition a common enemy: the easiest way a movement makes itself whole, turned on the most ancient target there is.

And this week, in races where the office actually does touch Israel, the pattern surfaced again. Three candidates won by leveling the “enabling genocide” charge against their opponents; no policy position could have had the same impact. The conflict will change, but what stays is the inherited story that makes some conflicts available for moral performance and leaves others unseen.

Jewish people comprise approximately 12% of New York City’s population. This is a community that helped make the city what it is, and now finds itself sorted to the “wrong” side. For them the conflict was never a performance, and neither is the sorting — it is where they live.

And “Antizionism” is just its most current name.

Sources

Grubbs, Joshua B., Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, and A. Shanti James. “Moral Grandstanding and Political Polarization: A Multi-Study Consideration.” Journal of Research in Personality 88 (2020): 104009.

Hamlin, Alan, and Colin Jennings. “Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications.” Strathclyde Discussion Papers in Economics, no. 09-18. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2009.

Tosi, Justin, and Brandon Warmke. Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

White, Robert S. “An Antisemitic Transference and Countertransference.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 1–15. The quotations from Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) and Otto Fenichel (“Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism,” American Imago 1, 1940) are drawn from this source.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

“A Lot”

I have been told throughout my life that I am “a lot.” Too sensitive, very loud, very intense, overly opinionated, dramatic. I want to say “Jewish,” but that one was usually implied.

The first person to tell me that I was “too much” was a girl in my second-grade class. She informed me with admirable clarity that she did not like me because I was short, had orange hair, and a big mouth. For the record, I am still short, I still have orangish hair, and I will always have a big mouth.

She was, in her own way, correct, and she was also doing what kids do: repeating what adults had taught her to notice. It worked because I remembered it.

I was the kid who sensed things, who picked up on the “thing under the thing under the thing,” and then was like, “Well, maybe it is not actually a thing.” I was, and remain, someone who knew when something was off — usually before other people did — and I said so. Sometimes I was even right.

In fact, my younger brother Jeffrey once told me in a moment of great fraternal generosity that my accuracy rating was approximately 97%. Regarding important things, he meant.

I am wrong about plenty — only several years ago I learned that gefilte fish swims in neither fresh nor salt water because it is not actually a fish… and here I was thinking it was its own species. But in terms of what is off in a room, or what is about to go wrong, the 97% was probably accurate.

This may sound like a good thing to have — this kind of clarity — but what it actually meant was that 97% of the time, I knew. And 97% of the time, most people did not listen. That is because I was the speaker: the sensitive, too-loud, “too much” one.

It is a lot easier to manage or dismiss the speaker than to deal with the truth. Unfortunately, it usually works this way.

The “Never To Be Forgiven Club”

As a kid, I had a lot of opinions. I was particularly offended by double standards. When I was eight or nine, I founded the “Never To Be Forgiven Club.” This was an exclusive list of adults who had wronged me in ways I considered structurally significant.

Some members included the chairman of my father’s department at Ohio State, who made me wear a life preserver on his speedboat in Maine while the grownups sat in the open air, unencumbered by a humiliating flotation device. Or my uncle, who informed me I could not play catch with him and my male cousin because they were using a baseball, and apparently, in his cosmology, girls could only catch a softball. To this day, the “Never To Be Forgiven Club” has granted no pardons.

But here is what eventually happened. As I got older, I changed the membership requirements for the club. This was not because people changed or because the bylaws were outdated; I actually stopped believing that I was someone worthy of being wronged.

Somewhere along the way, I had decided that I must be the problem. So, whatever offense would normally fast-track someone into the club, I attributed to something I had done. The club kept operating; its members became people who had hurt the feelings of the people I love.

(If you have anyone you would like to recommend for membership, please message me.)

But here is the thing about being told early and often that who you are is a problem: you start to believe it. Slowly, the way water shapes a stone.

You learn to scan the room.
You learn which opinions belong inside the room or not anywhere at all.

You apologize for things you didn’t do, and then you apologize for apologizing.

It reminds me of my grandmother, who would send a thank-you note for a thank-you note.

The Cost of Misrecognition

Some of you know that I am an antisemitism scholar and part of a team of international nerds working to establish antisemitism studies as its own discipline, like anthropology, economics, or gender studies.

When I tell people this — and I tell them my work involves creating this model that shows people we need to think about antisemitism differently, not as a belief or a prejudice, but as a framework that decides who we are regardless of who we actually are — they ask, “How did you even come up with this?”

I have an answer that I use at academic conferences that is competent and historically accurate, but here’s the actual version:

What I have come to understand after so many years of obsessing about antisemitism is that, in a strange way, it is almost not even about Jews. The suffering it causes Jews is very specific and painful, but the engine of it — the thing that gets inside a person and stays there — is about something a lot bigger than us.

It is really about how humans recognize or misrecognize each other, and the categories we lay over people and what those categories do to the actual person underneath. It is about what it costs to be seen accurately and the price we pay when we aren’t.

This is why on Pride Shabbat, I think my research is somehow on topic. I want to emphasize, though, that the closet is not a metaphor for the Jewish predicament, and the Jewish predicament is not a metaphor for the closet.

But there is a question that every human being, no matter who they are, has to face: What does it cost to be who you are in a world that would prefer you weren’t? And what do you pay if you decide not to be?

We all want to be loved and we all want to feel safe, and we will do almost anything to have those things. We will swallow our opinions, we will laugh at jokes that really aren’t funny, and we will nod along even when we do not agree. In fact, this behavior is rewarded; it is seen as being mature or reasonable.

But sometimes what we are actually doing is becoming strangers to ourselves.

The Wager

There is a moment in Jewish history I think about a lot: the Enlightenment.

A couple hundred years ago in Europe, the door cracked open for us. After centuries of being kept out of cities, professions, universities, and polite society, Jews were suddenly being invited in. We could be citizens of France, Germany, or England.

We were told, sometimes gently, sometimes not, “You can come in, but leave the Jewishness at the door. Be a Jew at home and a normal person on the street.”

Compared to the Jewish reality before the Enlightenment, this looked like an upgrade. It looked like a reasonable deal: lose the Jewishness, the dress, the language, the names, and you get to be a person just like everyone else.

Many Jews took the deal because we were tired and we wanted in. Moshe became Michael, Yiddish gave way to German. Families changed their names, softened their accents, and sent their children to schools where they could become indistinguishable. Jewish women hosted the most important salons in Berlin in flawless German with no trace of where they came from. They were brilliant, they were beloved, and they were almost accepted.

But you know how that story ended.

When the trains came, no one cared how un-Jewish a Jew looked or how assimilated they were. Whatever we had tried to soften or file off of ourselves, people could still see it if they chose to.

The deeper cost is actually one that does not require other people or trains; it is that we could no longer see ourselves.

We had spent generations becoming a version of us that was easier for someone else, and at the end of it, that someone else did not want us either.

The damage is not just what others do to you; it is what you end up doing to yourself. This is one of the hardest lessons in our history.

We cannot buy safety by erasing ourselves. The bill comes due, and the thing you sold to pay it was the only thing that was ever yours.

I Fell for the Deal

I will say it plainly because it is the only way to say it: I would rather have been mentally ill than gay; I would have taken almost any other explanation. It was not about the people around me; by the time I was old enough to know, they would have been fine. It was about me, about the version of myself I had already built — ”too much” in eleven other ways — and the absolute conviction that one more thing would tip the scale.

And it wasn’t only about being gay. In bad jobs and bad friendships, I assumed the problem was me, which is why I stayed in them longer than I should have. I tried to change myself instead of leaving.

In situation after situation, perception often outweighed aptitude —

I could be right, and it did not matter.
I could be excellent, and it did not matter.

Eventually, I started to doubt my own readings, even the 97%.

Maybe I wasn’t seeing the world correctly to begin with?

The Trap

So, I did what I learned to do: I apologized, I tried to shrink, I adjusted, I performed, I tried harder, and I tried to want less.

But there is a particular trap that closes around people who are told over and over again that they are “too much,” “wrong,” or “the problem.”

When you try to say, “Wait, I don’t actually think I am,” or you try to say, “No, that’s not true,” your protest becomes the evidence against you

“You’re being too sensitive about being called too sensitive.”
“You’re arguing too hard about being told you argue too hard.”

A frame closes around you, and you can only get out by becoming smaller or leaving the room.

After enough years, you stop trusting what you see.

When the world has told you in a hundred small ways that who you are is wrong, this is rational. It is reasonable to try to be like someone else because the cost of not making the wager looks impossibly high. It looks like loneliness; it looks like exile.

So, we make the wager, file ourselves down, and we hope that if we are quiet enough, smooth enough, and normal enough, we will be let in.

Already Alone

Here is what I have learned — and I have learned it the hard way, and I am still learning it: it doesn’t work. The wager always comes due.

The self you try to bury keeps knocking. You can outrun it for a year, for ten years, for forty years, but it lives in your house and it is the room you’re in now.

The part that took me the longest to understand is this: the thing I was afraid of — the thing we are all afraid of, being alone, unloved, or unsafe — we were already there.

We were already alone.

If you bring only a costume to the people in your life, you are not actually with them. You are with the costume. The costume gets to be loved, the costume gets invitations, and you are just watching someone else be liked.

Keeping the Receipts

What changed for me was nothing dramatic; it was slow and incremental. It was a few people who looked at me, saw the whole person, and found that fine. People who preferred it, who noticed when it was absent and wanted it back.

Jeffrey was one of them.

The 97% line came in my late 20s or early 30s. It was long after I had left home for college and grad school, and well into the years when I stopped trusting my own readings. But somewhere along the way, Jeffrey decided to keep the books on me. “I see you. I am keeping track. The world is not going to give you credit for being right, but I am going to know.”

That is one of the rare kindnesses one person can offer another: to keep the receipts on someone else’s life until they are strong enough to keep them themselves.

If you have ever done that for another person, held the record, told them, “I know what you actually are,” you are doing something extraordinary.

You are giving someone back to themselves.

What Pride Is

I think this is what Pride is, underneath the parade.

Pride is the radical, terrifying, and almost holy refusal of the wager —

I will not capitulate.
I will not buy safety with my own erasure.

I will be the person I am, and I will find out who can love that person.

The ones who can?
Those are mine.

“Your blood is sacred no more.” That is how Dalia Ziada explained the fatwa issued against her, on Shai Davidai’s podcast last year. The fatwa meant that the protection civilization is supposed to extend to a human being had been withdrawn, and the withdrawal had been pronounced by a religious authority equipped to make it stick. She left Cairo because staying would have killed her.

Dalia is an Egyptian writer and political analyst, a devout Muslim — an Arab Spring figure who never stopped, a critic of Hamas and political Islam, a senior fellow at think tanks across three countries. She now coordinates the Washington office of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. For the past two academic years she has been visiting American campuses with Hillel International, speaking from inside her own tradition to audiences mostly unequipped to hear her.

When I saw her last week, Dalia made an unexpected observation: “Israel is the glue holding the Jewish people together.”

Even though I was raised secular and live a secular life now, I know and feel this in every part of who I am. And yet, since October 7, the voices telling the Jewish people, telling me, threaten to drown out that knowing.

I wanted to understand when it had clicked for her — personally, not analytically.

“It clicked,” she told me, “after October 7th, when I got to the United States and saw what the Jewish community was suddenly absorbing.” What she saw was a structural inversion of the standard story.

The standard story is that Western liberal democracies extend protection to Jewish minorities, and treat Israel with measured criticism, as parallel signs of their own liberalism. Dalia’s claim is the opposite: that the Jewish communities in Western societies are one of the main reasons those democracies are still standing — and that what holds them together, as Jewish communities, is Israel. Because a people without a place is held together only by memory, and memory eventually attenuates.

The argument runs through social cohesion, a sense of belonging.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s long strategy — what its own documents call Civilizational Jihad — is calibrated to a Western world that has become post-belonging, post-collective, atomized into individuals who no longer experience themselves as bound to anything larger than their own preferences. Such a world is permeable because there is no shared substance to defend. And the strategy works because the target stops being a society in the demanding sense — in the sense that, together, despite differences, we are responsible for one another. We become merely a population.

But somehow, despite outdated, often ineffective Jewish institutions and scrambling efforts to “combat antisemitism,” Jewish communities in the West have retained that demanding sense, alone, among groups of comparable visibility. Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh — all of Israel is responsible for one another.

We are still a people that cohere, and after October 7th the cohesion intensified rather than weakened. Dalia takes this to be an important political fact in the West right now. In the United States, most American Jews have decided not to stand down, not to capitulate to a false narrative. That decision has helped hold the country to its commitments in ways the institutions of American liberalism, on their own, could not.

The conclusion: Jewish communities aren’t just beneficiaries of Western liberal democracy; they are one of its load-bearing walls.

Your blood is sacred no more.
That is also, exactly, how it feels to be Jewish right now.

There is, in our moment, an architecture around Jewish life — a frame that decides in advance what Jewish danger means, what Jewish speech is for, what counts as vulnerability and what counts as manipulation. The fatwa against Dalia was issued in language that frame would recognize. The kill order against Jews has arrived in a different language, from different authorities, but the structure is the same.

Blood declared unsacred; the ordinary safety most of us can count on, withdrawn. Whoever wishes to do so, may.

Historian Shulamit Volkov has written about Jewish scientists in Imperial and Weimar Germany — Nobel laureates, university chairs, directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute — people whose prestige was as real as prestige gets. In 1933 it was revoked as a single transaction. The work hadn’t changed and hadn’t been reassessed; what changed was that the role authorizing the prestige had been retracted. Safety has the same structure. If protection can be withdrawn on command, it was never fully protection.

“Antisemitism came for me too,” Dalia explained. She was condemned because she spoke out against Hamas, supported Israel’s right to defend itself; because she said in public what she had concluded in private.

The price has been the same.

In her interview with Davidai, Dalia shared something else worth noting: She learned her resilience from the Jewish people. The witness was also a student, and her account of Jewish cohesion holding the line is the report of someone who has personally survived by following the example.

She is, in short, not a sympathetic outsider offering solidarity; she is a strategic analyst who has spent her career mapping the architecture of power in her region, and she has paid for what she has seen.

What Dalia said to me last week extended beyond the politics of recognition. It was something entirely different — it was the other kind of being seen, the kind that is usually unavailable to the Jewish people.

The politics of recognition is vertical. One party recognizes; another is recognized. The recognizer occupies the higher position by virtue of holding the verdict. Even sympathetic recognition operates within that asymmetry: we have looked at you and decided you are acceptable. The grammar places the speaker above the subject, and to accept the recognition is to accept the position.

What Dalia offered was horizontal. It had nothing to do with acceptance, permission or sympathy — she said something cooler and more astonishing: you are the load-bearing wall. You are why the rest of the structure has not yet fallen, and the countries where your people held their ground have held their ground. The countries where it didn’t, haven’t.

This is what I see. It is an observation, made by someone whose vantage point is unusually clear and whose incentives to make it are unusually weak. The position from which she speaks is not above the subject; it is alongside it, looking at the same picture.

This is what testimony, properly understood, sounds like. It’s not a verdict from a tribunal, but a report from a witness. It’s also what we have been waiting for, and what we have stopped expecting.

For so long the available register has been the tribunal one: are you good Jews or bad Jews, are you the kind of Jews we like or the kind we don’t, can you condemn enough, soften enough, qualify enough to be permitted into the room. Even the friendlier versions of the question carry the same architecture. We are typically being graded, the subject of a sentence whose verb belongs to somebody else. This perpetual degradation of our voice is what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice” — the harm of having what you say received as needing to be discounted because of who is saying it.

For Jews speaking about antisemitism, the discount has been a near-constant. The report is reclassified as exaggeration, the alarm as advocacy, and the wound as bid for advantage. The act of testifying becomes evidence against the testimony, and the speaker is left holding the proof of something that, by the time she has finished proving it, has been resealed against her.

And then someone walks in from outside the entire frame and says, simply: I see what is actually happening. Your people are holding the line; the line that everyone else thinks they are holding for themselves, they are holding it because you are holding it. Without you, the rest collapses on a timeline I can already read.

What such a moment brings, when it finally arrives, is relief. It’s not vindication or satisfaction. It’s just relief. Relief at being seen accurately, in a way that asks for no performance, by someone whose seeing was never conditional on it.

This is what it feels like to be recognized as people. As people in the strong sense: as a collective with a history, a structure, a function in the world that is visible to a careful observer. Not as a problem to be managed or as a case to be heard, but as a fact about reality — about what’s true in the world.

We have not been seen this way in a long time.

There is one thing more, I wanted to mention.

The night before Dalia fled Cairo, she sat at her window and watched the sun set for an hour. She told herself she would not see it again. She has told the story since, through tears, on Davidai’s podcast.

Last week, I gave her a small thing, a Seal of Solomon pendant. I bought it years ago in Israel, dipped it in the waters of the Mediterranean — meant to protect me and now her. I warned her twice it was probably not real gold, and not to wear it in the shower. We squeezed each other’s hands.

Imagine what that hour at the window was. The light on the buildings she had grown up looking at. The color the dust took in the late air. The city falling into evening exactly as it had every other evening of her life, with no concession to the fact that she was leaving. She was memorizing what until that night had not needed memorizing — the ordinary, the given, the background against which a life is lived. The sunset had not been a thing; it had been the air the things were in. Now she had to carry it inside herself, because the place that held it had become a place that wanted her dead.

The world in which she can return to that window is the world where the fatwa against her has been lifted because the conditions that produced it have collapsed. It is the same world where Jewish blood is sacred. Her safety and ours are one condition.

Until Jewish life is safe again, Dalia cannot go home.
And until Dalia can go home, we are not safe either.

The memory is not enough.
She should have the sunset.

Sources

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Volkov, Shulamit. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

I come from a family of enthusiastic Democrats. My brother volunteers in his local party, made calls and canvassed for Kamala in 2024, and knows every Democrat in his district. My mother had a slew of yard signs at the foot of her driveway during that campaign. Although I vote in a different district, I remember the names on those signs. So when Ohio State Senator Dr. Beth Liston’s Facebook post about Israel surfaced in my feed last fall, it caught my attention.

The Facebook Post

The post runs several paragraphs and warrants careful reading.

On September 12, 2025, Liston announced that she had canceled a planned legislative trip to Israel. She had intended to go in order to “learn and ask tough questions of the Israeli government actions, particularly related to humanitarian aid in Gaza.” As a minority member of the Ohio legislature, her effectiveness lay in asking questions, “with the goal of pointing out issues and improving policy” — the mode of engagement she meant to bring to the trip. In preparation she had studied history books, news articles, NGO publications, and congressional reports; she had also met with Jewish and Palestinian constituents, seeking to guard against “biased one-sided perspectives” and to arrive with “a list of things to ask.”

Then the pivot: “What I decided was that I didn’t just need to guard against propaganda. I WAS the propaganda in this sponsored trip. I did not want to be used as a tool in support of the Israeli government actions. I cancelled the trip.”

The post closes in the register of civic gratitude: “If you emailed, called or otherwise reached out to me. THANK YOU. I believe this is how democracy is supposed to work. We are indeed better when we work together.” Five days later, in an interview with a local publication, the journalist called her “rare” for listening to constituents and “overtly transparent.” Democracy working as it should.

Read quickly, the post looks like a politician responding to constituent pressure. Read closely, it follows a more striking shape. The first paragraph sets up the trip and her intent. The second details her preparation. The third pivots to the recognition and the cancellation. The fourth arrives at civic gratitude.

The issue is not Liston’s criticism of Israel or her cancellation of the trip. The issue is that, in her account, a trip she had prepared for as an opportunity to ask tough questions was still named “propaganda.” What produced that verdict requires a closer look.

Performing Deliberation

The most important feature of Liston’s post is her preparation. She studied, consulted widely, and met with both Jewish and Palestinian constituents. She described the project as an effort to arm herself against “biased one-sided perspectives.” By any reasonable measure, that preparation appears exemplary, which is precisely what makes the post structurally revealing. Her conclusion cannot easily be dismissed as uninformed or careless. Yet the very preparation that establishes her seriousness also helps insulate the conclusion from challenge. The analysis here is not a judgment of her character, but an examination of the framework operating through her.

Deliberation becomes most structurally powerful when it is sincere, and Liston’s deliberation was sincere. She was genuinely preparing, genuinely consulting, genuinely open as she understood openness to be. The conditions, though, were skewed because the framework through which she would process the encounter with Israel had already shaped what she could find. By the time she opened the books and met the constituents, the framework had already narrowed what could count as a verdict. When she writes that she “WAS the propaganda,” she is reporting a conclusion her framework had already prepared her to reach.

How do we know? The post leaves two traces: first, her refusal to plant a tree in the Gaza Envelope before the cancellation; second, a selectivity that reverses her own accountability principle. Each one alone is suggestive; together, they converge to reveal an underlying structure.

Before the trip, Liston was asked to plant a tree in the Gaza Envelope, the communities along the Gaza border destroyed on October 7. She declined, describing the act as a “photo op” she could not perform “when so many in my district felt this personally.”

The Gaza Envelope includes Kfar Aza and Be’eri, communities attacked on October 7. A ceremonial act of commemoration at the place where Israeli families were slaughtered registered, within her framework, as propaganda adjacency. Her framework subsumed Israeli suffering into “the conflict” before it could register on its own terms. Witness became an unavailable category. That she could describe the gesture as a “photo op” admits one of two readings: she lacked knowledge of what the Gaza Envelope is, in which case her preparation contained a gap in the shape of Jewish suffering; or she had the knowledge, and the framework converted a massacre site into a propaganda venue while keeping the conversion hidden from her. Either reading implicates the framework.

The second trace is the selectivity. Liston participates in plenty of American institutions she has ample reason to criticize — the Ohio legislature shaped by a Republican majority, a federal government she opposes on Trump-era foreign policy. The disqualifying force, the sense that proximity creates complicity, activates only with Israel. Her own stated job is to ask tough questions and hold power accountable, and going on the trip was the accountability move. The framework made it unthinkable anyway, which tells us the principle is selective: corruption lives where the framework places it, and only there.

The Testimony Problem

Underneath the selectivity is a deeper issue about whose testimony the framework can hear at all. The trip would have been Liston’s encounter with direct Israeli testimony — survivors, families, witnesses at the sites where October 7 happened. The cancellation makes that encounter impossible, which tells us something the rest of the post leaves unsaid: the Jewish constituents she met in Ohio were one kind of input; survivors at Kfar Aza and Be’eri would have been another. The same framework could accommodate one kind of Jewish voice and render the other suspect in advance.

The Ohio meetings fit a known slot: Jewish voices weighing in on a political question, their concerns to be considered alongside others within the bounded structure of a constituent meeting. Survivors at Kfar Aza and Be’eri would arrive on different terms — as witnesses speaking from inside the event itself, their testimony shaped by what happened to them at the site of the massacre. That kind of testimony exceeds what the framework can hold, because Israelis have already been coded as the structurally powerful party. The coding overrides the content of testimony, including testimony about subjection to mass violence.

To register survivor testimony as power-coded — converting a Jewish position of acute vulnerability into a Jewish position of structural advantage — is the framework’s maneuver and what it runs on. Receiving survivor testimony as testimony would require the framework to recognize Jewish-Israeli suffering as suffering, and that recognition would crack the category assignments upon which the framework is built.

So, the framework filters in advance, leaving Jewish testimony admissible only when it has been mediated, curated, or translated through institutions the framework trusts. Direct Jewish testimony, survivors speaking about what was done to them, is placed under suspicion before it can be heard.

The History of a Pattern

The shape Liston’s post moves through has a history.

The historian Saul Friedländer, in his study of Nazi Germany and the Jews, coined the term “redemptive antisemitism” to name a distinct ideological formation, distinguished from ordinary Judeophobia, social resentment, and political scapegoating by the salvational meaning attached to removal. In Friedländer’s account, “the Jew” functioned as an irreducibly destructive force, a contaminating presence whose removal constituted purification itself. The perpetrators could experience themselves as saviors.

Friedländer was naming the ideology that produced the Holocaust. What follows borrows only the formal structure he isolated — contamination identified, removal experienced as restoration — and bears no equivalence to its original referent. The racial metaphysics, the eliminationist content, the state apparatus, and the violence are absent and incommensurable. The pattern travels; the historical conditions that made it lethal do not.

What happens when the same engine runs on liberal-democratic proceduralism, progressive epistemic frameworks, and the credentialing systems of contemporary political culture? It becomes a structural afterlife of the pattern Friedländer identified. The contamination is renamed as “complicity”; the purification is renamed as the responsible democratic decision to decline; and the restored self looks like a legislator grateful to her constituents for helping her see.

Friedländer’s original version required the destruction of the liberal democratic order to operate at full scale, but this version runs inside that order, on its own materials.

Why It’s Hard to See

If the pattern is so stable, why is it so hard to recognize from inside?

Imagine a riverbed. The water moves visibly, catching light; the unseen bed determines which way it can go. Arguments and deliberations are the water. The framework is the bed.

Philosopher Jürgen Habermas explains why the framework feels like ordinary thinking. He distinguishes between the lifeworld and the systemic forces that distort it from within. The lifeworld is the background through which people make sense of the world. People experience their background assumptions as common sense, as the way the world simply is. When Liston describes preparing herself against “biased one-sided perspectives,” the framework she is preparing with remains invisible to her as a framework. It is the common-sense ground from which biased perspectives become visible as biased. Before deliberation begins, that background has already organized the field of judgment: what appears as evidence, what seems relevant, and which conclusions can present themselves as reasonable.

The further question — who gets excluded before the argument begins — belongs to philosopher Nancy Fraser. She explains how deliberative procedures absorb existing power relations and reproduce them. The rules of who counts as a legitimate voice are settled before the debate begins, built into the structure of participation itself. Fraser calls this a failure of “participatory parity”: real deliberation requires arriving on equal terms, with the structural conditions of voice equally distributed. Where those conditions fail, the structure filters out certain participants; they get turned away before the debate begins. That is the mechanism that turns Liston’s preparation into procedural insulation. The Jewish constituents she met were received on her terms — as voices in a scheduled consultation, contributing perspectives to a process she would adjudicate. The structure preserved her position as the one making the categorization and reduced their position to input. The testimony she gathered counted formally; structurally, it remained inert.

From inside, exclusion has a phenomenology. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew describes how the antisemite’s conclusion comes before the reasoning, producing a structure that looks like conviction and functions like immunity, registering as a feeling of clarity — finally seeing what others are too compromised to admit.

In 2.0 the same phenomenology shows up inverted: the courage is the courage to recognize one’s own complicity, to say “I was the propaganda,” to withdraw. The all-caps in Liston’s pivot — “I WAS the propaganda” — mark the moment as breakthrough recognition. The verdict feels arrived at, not delivered. That can be genuine moral bravery, and yet the structure Sartre named runs through it.

Why It Holds

The standard defenses against antisemitism, then — challenge the arguments, expose the bad faith, demonstrate the prejudice — are designed for a logic that operates in the open. They assume conscious hostility, and they assume that the argument is the place where antisemitism operates. Both assumptions fail here because the logic operates below the argument, in the interpretive framework that structures what arguments can mean. The operators are sincere, but the logic absorbs its refusals. By declaring herself “the propaganda” in order to refuse it, Liston became propaganda for the framework’s verdict that the encounter itself is contaminating.

What makes this stable is that the very things we trust most are the framework's substrate: deliberation, accountability, credentialing, epistemic justice, the conscientious legislator listening to her constituents and asking tough questions.

The framework also depends on a particular distinction: antizionism as a position separable from antisemitism. The distinction can be legitimate and sometimes sincerely held. The problem is what it does institutionally: once a position is coded as antizionist, the antisemitic structure of interpretation it may carry becomes harder to examine. That is what gives the framework access in settings that would refuse explicit antisemitism.

Anywhere both conditions hold — universities, legislatures, NGOs, the professional associations of liberal-democratic life — the pattern can reproduce itself while everyone acts in good faith and speaks in the idiom of conscience. The very institutions designed to guard against the older form of the logic have become the vehicle of a quieter one.

Sources

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80.
———. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
———. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

This piece originally appeared in Jungle World (German) and The Times of Israel.

“It is a worthy dream; many of us still hold on to it.” — Shulamit Volkov

I learned the word “ansteckend” on a bus in Weimar. Someone yawned, and then I yawned, and then two other girls yawned, and someone said that yawning was contagious — ansteckend — and that was how it entered my vocabulary. On a bus, in the early morning, in May, in a city that had once held within a few kilometers the highest aspirations of European civilization and the worst atrocity it ever produced.

Weimar is that kind of place. Goethe lived here, Schiller too. Nietzsche spent his final lucid years in a house on the Frauenplan before his mind gave out. Bauhaus was founded here. In 1919, the first German democracy was proclaimed here because Berlin was too unstable. And eight kilometers up the road, on the Ettersberg hill where Goethe used to walk, the regime that destroyed that democracy built Buchenwald. The distance between the Goethe-Schiller monument in the town square and the camp on the hill is not a paradox that requires explanation; it’s just the distance. And you feel it when you live there.

I spent time there as a teenager — a Jewish American girl whose grandmother had come from Germany, riding that bus to school in the mornings, walking the muddy streets, learning words. This was several years after the Wall had come down, and Weimar was becoming bright and alive, new paint going up over old façades, the future being laid over the past in real time. But the past was still physically present. My host family’s bathroom still had the old East German tiles, brown, with blue and red rims around the faucets. In the kitchen there were utensils stamped with the names of manufacturers that no longer existed. The city was shedding its skin, slowly, so you could still see what was underneath.

Earlier this month, the German court upheld a ban against a group called “Kufiyas in Buchenwald.” They had planned a vigil at the concentration camp memorial — to protest, in their words, “the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.” The protest was moved to a square in the city instead.

I felt relief. And then the jolt of the uncertainty about next time.

My host parents had grown up in the former East Germany, in a state that had declared itself antifascist by decree, largely leaving the actual reckoning to others. Sometimes on weekends I sat with elderly people over Kaffee und Kuchen who told me, with wide eyes, how terrifying the Allied bombings had been — their voices carrying a weight that seemed to want something from me, but I was too polite to say what I might have said. I’m not sure I even knew what I was thinking. It was only later, looking back, that I understood why this may have felt awkward — the Jewish American girl in the room, trying to be a good guest, while something much older moved beneath the surface of the conversation.

One weekend I took the train to Dresden with a friend. Her stepbrother showed us around. It seemed like everything was under construction. After a boring boat ride along the Elbe, we hit the shops and my friend bought orange platform sneakers. That night, we danced until three in the morning at a techno club and woke up to the most delicious smell — Rinderrouladen. That afternoon, the family ate and sat together. Someone showed me a book of photographs of Dresden before the war — a city of extraordinary beauty, documented as if in anticipation of its own destruction. Someone brought out the photo albums. Paging through them, I noticed the small circular pins on the lapels of relatives in some of the family pictures.

I didn’t know what to do with any of it. I was a teenager with a messy ponytail and circles under her eyes who had been dancing until three in the morning. I kept passing the cake.

My host mom was a teacher at my school. At home she was warm and funny — the kind of person who noticed everything, who always made sure we didn’t run out of Nutella, who secretly cleaned the mud off my shoes after I went to sleep, because I couldn’t understand why I should do this when the shoes would keep getting muddy. She had a sharp enough sense of humor to mention to a colleague, in front of me, “Joanne always leaves the house with wet hair.” She wasn’t being unkind. She was being honest, the way people are honest about someone they’ve absorbed into their lives. At school she was one of the teachers and I was just another student — which was, I came to understand, its own form of love.

One evening her daughter and I got the giggles at dinner while great-aunt Ilse was visiting — the unstoppable kind — and were sent upstairs for being “rude.” We sat on the stairs and tried to muffle it and mostly failed.

Her husband was quieter, but no less present. He had built their house with his own hands, the way people in the former East Germany learned to make things work. He could build or fix anything. When he smiled he would blink slowly, like a cat in a patch of sun. He spoke in the heavy dialect of the region and I learned to understand it; it sounded rich and warm, like something that had been lived in for a long time. In the evenings they listened to hits from the 60s and 70s. They loved Joe Cocker; I teased them about it, called them the “Joe Cocker Club” — and sometimes that music would follow us into the car on longer drives, the windows fogging a little at the edges.

One of those drives took us to Nuremberg, the city where my grandmother had spent part of her childhood. I should say: my grandmother was born in America, to German parents who had come over around the turn of the century — part of that earlier wave of German Jewish families, assimilated, prosperous, the kind of people who belonged to the Ethical Culture Society. But my grandmother’s family had gone back to Germany for a time, and she had grown up partly there, in a large house in Nuremberg, surrounded by cousins. She remembered being in Hamburg when someone threw a rock at their car. She remembered coming back to America poor, unable to speak English, but with beautiful clothes — and being elected class president anyway, until a teacher said the class shouldn’t have voted for the best-dressed girl with broken English. My grandmother told the teacher that had hurt her feelings. The teacher apologized, they kept in touch, and my grandmother invited her to her wedding.

By the time I knew her, Germany was not something she spoke of much. I think she had let it go long before the war made letting go obligatory — let it go in the ordinary way of immigrant daughters, embarrassed by a mother’s thick accent, a mother’s body, the visible foreignness of the life they had left behind. The house in Nuremberg belonged to a self she had already set aside.

But I wanted to find it, and I had an address — a number, a coordinate for something I had never seen and she no longer claimed.

Joe Cocker on the radio, my host mom telling my host dad to stop driving so fast on the autobahn and my host sister snoozing on my shoulder in the back. The four of us winding south through Thuringia toward a city I knew mostly from its other history — the rallies, the laws, the trials. We found the street or found where it should have been. The building was another building. So much of the city had been destroyed during the war that whatever my grandmother had known — the rooms, the cousins, the life before — was replaced by the rebuilt city going about its afternoon. We drove past the Palace of Justice, where the trials had been held. We didn’t say very much. I got out of the car and took a photo. Afterward we ate at McDonald’s in the inner city. I went to the bathroom and had no toilet paper in my stall. When I asked the lady in the next stall if she had some, I heard how fluent my German had become.

In a few months, I would show my grandmother the photograph I had taken. She would look at it and shrug. It could have been any street corner. It meant nothing to her. The only photograph that elicited a reaction was the one I took of the Ferragamo store. I can still picture her row of shoes on the closet floor of her New York apartment — shiny black patent leather tips, neatly aligned.

I have thought about that drive many times since. They didn’t have to take me or understand why it mattered. They just got in the car.

***

Back in Weimar, I sat in classrooms and had the conversations that German classrooms were, by then, required to have — about what happened, about responsibility, about memory. One teacher drew a firm distinction between Germans and Nazis: not all Germans were Nazis, she said. I pushed back. I felt angry in a way I couldn’t quite articulate — something about the smallness of the resistance, the largeness of the compliance. She held her position because she was a history teacher and she was being accurate. I wasn’t wrong to be angry, and she wasn’t wrong to be precise, and we both knew the conversation was about something more than the argument.

I remember walking the streets and not knowing where the camp was. I knew it was somewhere nearby — up on a hill, outside the city — but I couldn’t locate it, and for some reason I needed to. Every fence I passed, I wondered: maybe that’s part of it. Maybe that? It wasn’t until later that I understood you couldn’t see it from the city. That was, I came to think, its own kind of information.

And then one day we went.

We stood in the school courtyard waiting. The half silence of teenagers who understood, in some unspoken way, that this field trip was different. And then the ordinary sounds that filled it anyway — gum being chewed, backpacks zipping, someone dropping something on the ground with a thud. A murmur of kids who didn’t know what else to do with their hands. We could have grown up together, in a different history. Some of them knew that.

Inside, I remember the clock — stopped at the moment of liberation, the hands fixed at the hour the Americans arrived. I remember learning that the SS had built a zoo there — bears, monkeys, deer — funded by forced “donations” from the prisoners, maintained a few meters from the crematorium. Guards could be punished for mistreating an animal.

I remember wondering which people from the city — from my streets, from the buses I rode — had worked there, or known, or looked away.

I felt self-conscious the entire time. I was aware that people who knew I was Jewish might be watching me, curious how I would react. I tried not to react. I felt responsible, somehow, for not making it too much — for managing my own response so that no one around me would be uncomfortable. The memorial was sterile and carefully organized, and it didn’t have the gravity I had expected. The gravity, I think, lived elsewhere. It lived in the clock. It lived in the question of the neighbors. It lived in the tension of the courtyard before we left, in the sound of backpacks zipping.

My host mom was one of the teachers on the trip. When a few of us weren’t at the meeting point when it was time to leave, she chewed us out. The exchange student included. Because to her, I wasn’t a specimen behind glass or a guest to be handled carefully — I was a teenager who was late.

That mattered more to me than almost anything else from that day. The fact that she yelled at me too.

The last time I saw them both I was there with my own family. My host dad didn’t speak English, but he was the kind of person you still felt comfortable around. We left my son with him in the family room, watching YouTube, while my host mom and I went into the city to shop. When we came back they were perfectly content together, my seven-year-old and this man who had built his house with his hands and smiled like a cat in the sun.

We said goodbye next to our rental car. I needed to reverse and pull it out of a tight spot with a manual transmission. I told them they couldn’t watch — they were making me nervous. They stepped back. I stalled. I stalled again. Several attempts, several stalls. When I finally pulled out, I glanced in the mirror and saw that they had been watching the whole time, from a careful distance. I stopped the car and got out. We were all laughing too hard to do anything else.

It was 2022. We had known each other for over twenty years.

***

Earlier, before any of that, my host mom walked me back to the car. For a few seconds, we moved at the same speed; I noticed her hand at her wrist. I got in, pulled the door shut, fastened my seat belt. She stepped toward the window and held something out — her watch, modern, with a pink band, the one I had admired over dinner. She pressed it forward, I looked at the road ahead, my face hot — and then our eyes met and stayed.

When I look at the watch now, I think about what it means to hand someone time, about a German woman extending her arm through a car window toward a Jewish American woman whose grandmother’s house in Nuremberg she’d tried to find.

This past summer, my host dad died.

He had just turned seventy and just become a granddad. He had worked with his hands his whole life, and he and my host mom were finally getting to travel, to rest, to have the life they could never have imagined growing up in East Germany. And then he was gone.

She needed almost a month before she could find the words to even text me. It wasn’t because I was an afterthought — it was because she was devastated, and because telling me made it more real, and because I was someone to whom it had to be said.

I was still in touch with the friend I went to Dresden with. But after October 7, she posted antisemitic propaganda on Instagram — the kind she mistook for simply caring about humanity. We messaged back and forth. She couldn’t hear me. She thought I was the one who didn’t understand, and that growing up in Germany gave her more authority on the subject than I had.

***

And yet my host mom and I talked too.

She told me she believed Israel had a right to exist as a sovereign state. It sounds like a simple thing to say. It isn’t. It came from the same place as that text — the place that says: you are someone to whom I owe the truth.

And what I heard underneath her words was the thing I most needed to hear: you get to exist. Me. Her person, still, after all this time. The girl who left the house with wet hair, who learned the word for contagious on the school bus, whose grandmother’s house they helped her look for and couldn’t find.

I think this is what genuine reckoning looks like. The monuments, the court rulings, and the official positions of memorial sites matter. The German court was right, and I’m grateful. But those aren’t the places where reckoning happens. I think it has to happen through relationships that accumulate enough ordinary life to hold the hard things too.

This is what I think about when I read about “Kufiyas in Buchenwald.” The activists want to bring a political symbol to that hill — to make a statement, to perform a connection between one atrocity and another. I understand the impulse. This is not what that place is for.

What that place is for, or what it did for me, was something you can’t stage. It was listening to someone chew their gum, wondering which families, on which sides of which history, we each came from. It was being scolded for being late, the same as everyone else. It was not being handled. It was just being there, with people, in the normal discomfort of it.

I worry that too many people mistake the monument for the relationship, and the performance of memory for the human obligations memory is supposed to create. It is a world where a German woman and a Jewish American woman are still talking, so many years later, about muddy shoes and the Joe Cocker Club and the right of the other one to be here.

It often feels like the world is hanging by a string. I worry the law may not always hold the way it did for Buchenwald — but I’ve come to think that the law holds because of relationships like this one, not the other way around. The relationships are the anchors. They are what build and inform who we are in the world, what make us the kind of people who insist that the law hold, who notice when it might not. Without them, the monument is just stone and the ruling is just paper.

I don’t know how to protect that, exactly. I just know what it feels like to have one of those relationships. And I know that when she finally told me about Uwe, and I understood why it had taken her so long, what I felt wasn’t only sorrow. It was gratitude.

That after everything — after history, after more than two decades, after October 7 — I am still someone she has to tell.

***

In memory of Uwe

Something unusual happens in debates about Israel and antisemitism. Arguments often appear rigorous because they are saturated with supposed facts, yet rarely does anything get settled. Hopefully, when people debate, they share a tacit assumption that evidence could, in principle, prove a point. Participants may disagree about what the evidence shows, but they usually accept that it shows something. In discussions of Israel and antisemitism, that assumption is often absent. For example, the claim that Israel is an apartheid state is asserted, not debated.

When claims become insulated from challenge, the relationship between language and reality loosens. The result is what we understand to be true looks more like what we think or want to believe is true, not what’s real in the world. Statements circulate and arguments are made, but the pathways through which evidence normally revises belief close. In highly charged debates, questioning the prevailing framework can become difficult because the norms of the conversation discourage asking questions. Testimony can be dismissed before it is heard and narratives can harden until correction becomes morally impermissible. Someone who questions a claim against Israel, for example, maybe be cast as an apologist for genocide.

This how the connection between language and the word is lost. The task is to interrupt the process before it takes hold. We must notice when claims begin to insulate themselves from challenge. That way, we can keep conversations anchored to reality.

Is the snow white?

When we hear a claim, the basic question is: “does the statement match the world it describes?” The logician Alfred Tarski captured this principle clearly: “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.

What that means is that a statement is true only if the world is as the statement says. So the question for Israel debates becomes: does a conversation leave room for claims to be tested against reality?

In principle, debates about Israel rely on statements that make empirical claims. These can include whether a particular action occurred, whether patterns of violence meet legal definitions, whether a statement or policy should count as antisemitic. Evidence should be able to settle these questions.

In practice, participants in the debate find themselves talking past one another because they confuse three different categories:

1. what is the case

2. what social conventions permit people to say

3. the apparent moral urgency of the stakes

When these categories remain separate, evidence can do its work. When they are mixed, language stops tracking reality. The truth of a claim becomes entangled with whether it is acceptable to question it at all.

Keeping these categories distinct from each other is vital. What is true depends on the world itself — as Tarski observed, what must actually be the case. Social conventions belong to the conversation as they state what participants can say without sanction. Moral urgency is measured by the stakes — how costly hesitation or dissent appears when the moment feels charged. And usually, the cost of questioning is immediate and personal, while the cost of error is delayed and externalized onto those who must live with its consequences.

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A few days ago, Rachel Burnett published a sharp critique of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) in the Times of Israel. Her central argument is that labeling accusations against Israel as “libels” functions as a way to avoid engaging with their substance — and that the libel framework is particularly unjust to Palestinians, whose opposition to the state that they see as having displaced them cannot be reduced to irrational hatred. She’s right about this. But there’s a harder argument to be made — one that neither the libel framework nor its critics are making, and one that matters more.

Here it is: the same accusation can be worth taking seriously and can be used for distortion. These are not contradictory observations — they describe different registers of analysis. The first asks: is this true? The second asks: how is this being used? Neither question dissolves the other — a true accusation doesn’t settle how it’s being used, and a distorted use doesn’t settle whether it’s true.

Think of a screenshot of something you said ten years ago. The quote is accurate, but now, it’s being deployed to an audience to end a conversation rather than have one. Both questions stay open: did you say it, and what is it being used to do? The first doesn’t settle the second. Even if accountability is warranted, the way it’s being used does something else, and both are worth noticing.

The libel framework refuses both questions by declaring accusations “libels” in advance; the content is dismissed before it is examined, and the way accusations circulate is reduced to a single explanatory key: hatred. Antizionists also refuse both questions, but from the opposite direction — the accusations are treated as proven before the evidence arrives, and the question of how they are being used is dismissed as deflection.

Neither side asks the questions before deciding. And engaging with antisemitism requires both questions, asked honestly. The system doesn’t require bad faith — it works on true claims as readily as false ones, impervious to intent.

Content and Use

Start with something almost nobody wants to say plainly: Israel is an ethnostate and pluralistic at the same time.

The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law explicitly reserves the right of national self-determination for the Jewish people. Arab citizens serve in the Knesset, the judiciary, and some serve in the military. It is worth noting that “ethnostate” here does not carry the white-supremacist connotation it typically holds in Western discourse — Israel’s Jewish population is predominantly non-white, with the majority tracing their origins to the Middle East and North Africa.

The word “ethnostate” captures something real about Israel’s legal structure, but to call it only an ethnostate — to treat the label as exhaustive — erases the pluralistic dimensions entirely. This is not a contradiction to be resolved by picking a side; it’s a tension to be described accurately.

Israel is hardly alone in this. The friction between ethnic particularism and democratic pluralism runs through dozens of modern nation-states — from India’s Hindu nationalism to Hungary’s constitutional identity provisions to the ethnic definitions embedded in the Baltic citizenship laws that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. The question of how a state can enshrine a particular national character while guaranteeing equal citizenship to all who live within it is one of the central unresolved problems of modern political life. Israel is a specific instance of this problem, not an aberration from an otherwise settled norm. Treating it as uniquely monstrous shuts down the comparative analysis that would make the problem legible, and treating it as uniquely virtuous shuts down the criticism that would make reform possible.

Holding this tension is unpopular. But any framework that treats calling Israel an ethnostate as inherently false — as a libel, axiomatically illegitimate — cannot hold this tension. When debunking this supposed libel, substantive policy arguments are made: non-Jewish citizens serve in public life, many nations define themselves through ethnicity or faith. As Burnett correctly observes, this is precisely the kind of engagement with “specific laws, leaders, or actions” many define as legitimate criticism. This prevents many from staying on the meta-level they claim to occupy. They end up making exactly the kind of argument they say no one should have to make.

Antizionists have their own version of this evasion — and it is not, as one might expect, that they do the evidentiary work and merely skip the structural question. They skip both. The accusations are treated as self-evident: Israel is a settler-colonial state, Israel is committing genocide, Israel is an apartheid regime. These are presented as premises — starting points from which all subsequent reasoning flows. And because the conclusions are installed in advance, the question of how they are being used — whether they are doing analytical work or something else entirely — never arises. Often, to raise it is to be accused of deflection, or worse.

When Meaning Arrives First

Take the genocide accusation. Terrible things have happened in Gaza. The destruction of infrastructure, the displacement of populations, the killing of civilians — these are documented realities that demand serious moral and legal engagement.

What needs contesting is not the suffering but the timing: when the word “genocide” appears within twenty-four hours of October 7 — before any investigation, before any evidentiary process, before the military operation has even begun in earnest — what is that word doing? Some would say the answer is straightforward: the accusation draws on decades of prior evidence, and October 7 simply confirmed what was already documented. That argument deserves to be taken seriously. But taking it seriously means asking the question the essay insists on: whether the word arrived as a conclusion or as a frame is not settled by the existence of prior evidence — and the timing makes it worth asking.

This doesn’t mean the underlying realities are fabricated. It means the accusation was recruited into a structure that was no longer interested in whether it was true.

None of this requires denying that civilians are suffering. It requires noticing that the machinery was already running before the facts arrived.

Analysis or Reflex?

Those leaning into the libel framework see something real — that accusations against Israel often circulate within a repetitive, self-reinforcing structure that bears uncomfortable resemblances to older patterns of antisemitic thought. They are not wrong about this. The problem is their response.

Rather than analyzing how accusations get recruited into that structure — which would require distinguishing between what is being said and what it is doing — accusations automatically convert to libels. This empties the question before it can be asked.

And then something revealing happens — and Burnett deserves credit for surfacing this. When UNICEF Lebanon reports on airstrikes that killed over 250 people, “ALERT! NEW ANTIZIONIST LIBEL CIRCULATING!” is posted fifty-nine times by a proponent of the libel framework.

The framework has become a machine for converting any empirical input into confirmation of itself. At that point, it is just a reflex.

The irony is: this is the very structure we all claim to oppose.

Because this is how antisemitism works — as a system that decides in advance what Jewish actions mean, where every act of self-defense is aggression, every claim of victimhood is manipulation, every piece of counterevidence is proof of the conspiracy.

Content differs, but the operation is the same.

The Jewish Antizionism Question

There is a further problem.

With regard to antizionism, the libel framework carves out one exception: Jewish anti-Zionism before 1948 — the internal communal debates about whether a Jewish state was desirable. This, they say, was legitimate. Contemporary Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, by contrast, are treated as “tokenized” Jews recruited by a hate movement, analogous to the Yevsektsiya in the Soviet Union.

Burnett notices the asymmetry but doesn’t press it theoretically. It needs pressing.

This framing assumes that Jewish antizionists are externally manipulated — pulled into a framework that is foreign to them. This gets the mechanism exactly backwards. If antizionism operates within the broader system of antisemitism — and it does — then it does not stop at the boundary of the Jewish community. Systems like these do not respect group membership; they work on the targeted group as well as around it.

And here is where the institutional failure and the personal vulnerability meet. When the available defenses against antisemitism are themselves dishonest — when the structure that claims to protect you demands that you stop seeing what you can see, that you treat every accusation as a libel and every report as propaganda — it offers no real shelter. It offers an enclosure.

A person who cannot find a truthful account of their situation within the institutions that claim to represent them is not thereby freed from the system those institutions failed to confront—they’re left more exposed to it. Antisemitism doesn’t need a failed defense in order to work. It was working before the libel framework existed and will work after. But when the only available defense demands dishonesty — when holding the line means pretending you can’t see what you can see — it doesn’t protect anyone.

When Jews adopt the framework that treats Jewish sovereignty as inherently illegitimate, that is not an exception to antisemitism. It is antisemitism working on Jews—the system’s logic becomes the subject’s own reasoning, experienced as authentic conviction. This claim doesn’t need an exception for Jewish antizionists.

The Cage and the Bird

Franz Kafka wrote: “A cage goes in search of a bird.” That is what antisemitism looks like as a system — a structure that decides what Jews mean before Jews act and recruits everything that follows to confirm the decision; a structure with categorical certainty that resists every correction. This is dangerous; it’s the same pattern that Jews have encountered for centuries. We all see the cage clearly.

But Kafka did not write about the bird that goes in search of a cage. And yet that is what internalization looks like.

When Jews adopt, as their own conviction, the framework that was built to contain them — when the system works so thoroughly that the bird no longer needs to be caught — it enters the cage and calls it freedom. This is what Jewish antizionism looks like from here: not tokenization, not manipulation, but the system working from the inside.

Let’s not build cages of our own. The system works by making you believe you have to — and there is no comfortable place to stand for those who refuse.

The task is not to choose between these observations; rather, to develop a way of thinking capable of holding both. We have to ask — is the accusation true and what is it doing? — and refuse to let either question silence the other.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

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A Word’s Emotional Weight

Within twenty-four hours of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre of approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians—the deadliest single-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust—demonstrators in London, New York, and Sydney were already accusing Israel of committing “genocide.” This happened before the IDF had launched any sustained ground campaign and before any legal body had begun gathering evidence. The accusation’s speed alone isn’t proof of bad faith—moral horror at anticipated civilian casualties can precede deliberation—but it raises a question worth taking seriously: what exactly was the term “genocide” being used to for?

Consider what happened to the word “terrorism.” It began as a descriptor of specific, documented violence—acts designed to intimidate civilian populations for political ends—a term with real legal weight. Decades of overuse changed that. Today it functions in many contexts as a general pejorative for political violence someone finds objectionable, applied to insurgencies, protests, and state actors alike without regard for the legal criteria the term was designed to capture. The accusation has grown louder as the weight of its definition has weakened.

The trajectory of “genocide” in Israel-Palestine discourse follows the same pattern. Linguists call this “semantic pejoration”: when a term is repeated in ideologically charged contexts, its emotional force begins to replace its technical meaning. When “genocide” is applied selectively and repeatedly to a single Jewish political entity, it begins to function like an antisemitic slur.

What Does Genocide Actually Mean?

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust. He coined “genocide” in 1944 to name a crime for which international law didn’t yet have a term: the deliberate effort to destroy a people as such, rather than as a consequence of armed conflict. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide codified this as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The intent requirement—proof that the perpetrator aimed to eliminate a group as such—is what makes genocide different than war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Genocide requires proof that the perpetrator wanted to wipe a people from the earth. You can condemn civilian deaths in Gaza under the laws of war, or a single act of torture, without reaching for the gravest charge in international law.

These categories exist so that accountability can be proportionate and targeted. When they all become “genocide,” the meaning disappears, and with it the ability to assign specific legal responsibility when an actual genocide occurs. An accusation that rests entirely on the gravity of a word rather than on facts is a weak claim, however forceful it sounds.

Think of what happens when someone at work is accused of harassment without documentation, witnesses, or a formal process. If the evidence isn’t there, the charge should be dropped. But when it isn’t—when the accusation circulates anyway—it poisons the environment for everyone. People stop trusting the process. And when the same charge is eventually brought against someone who genuinely committed it, people are already exhausted. The word has been spent.

Something else can happen too: the process itself becomes the problem. When asking for evidence is met with “I shouldn’t have to prove it to you”—or worse, “the fact that you’re asking proves you’re complicit”—the demand for accountability has been flipped into an accusation. The person asking a reasonable question is now the one on trial.

When that response comes from a single person in a heated argument, it’s a bad faith move. When it comes from podiums, UN reports, academic conferences, and NGO campaigns, something more systematic is happening. Scholars of political epistemology call this “collective gaslighting”—when shared standards for testing a claim have been dismantled across institutions.

From Misuse to Slur

Getting “genocide” wrong is not, by itself, antisemitic. States and political actors misuse the term all the time for their own purposes. Russia, for example, invoked the Genocide Convention to describe how Ukraine was treating Russian-speaking populations in the Donbas region, claiming that Ukrainian cultural and language policies amounted to genocide. Genocide scholars rejected this outright, as there was no evidence of eliminationist intent, and the invocation appeared designed to provide legal cover for Russian military aggression. It was a cynical misuse of a serious legal instrument, but it had nothing to do with Jews. Russia was doing what powerful states sometimes do—weaponizing the language of human rights to justify their agenda.

So, what makes the misuse of “genocide” against Israel different?

The difference is that the misuse follows a specific pattern with a recognizable history. Unlike ordinary political hostility, antisemitic delegitimization tends to position Jews as a uniquely malevolent force: people whose actions are cast as threatening to humanity itself, and whose claims to victimhood, safety, or self-defense are treated with suspicion. Whatever Jews say in their own defense becomes further evidence of their guilt. In these accusations, the charge precedes the evidence, which is then constructed to justify it.

The misuse of “genocide” against Israel fits this pattern in three specific ways:

Timing: After October 7, 2023, the accusation of genocide surfaced within twenty-four hours, while Israel was still counting its dead, before IDF operations were underway. Verdict before inquiry.

Selectivity: Between 2016 and 2020, Myanmar’s military conducted operations against the Rohingya that the UN Fact-Finding Mission formally characterized as bearing the hallmarks of genocide. Military commanders had issued explicit dehumanizing statements about the Rohingya as a group—the kind of direct evidence of eliminationist intent that makes a genocide determination legally plausible. That campaign killed an estimated ten to twenty-five thousand people and displaced over 700,000 within weeks. The Tigray conflict (2020–2022) generated even stronger evidentiary claims: casualty estimates ranged from 162,000 to over 500,000, and human rights organizations documented systematic mass killings, forced starvation, and dehumanizing official statements also consistent with eliminationist intent.

In both cases, the sustained institutional pressure directed at Israel—measured in the volume and intensity of UN resolutions, academic conference programming, and NGO litigation campaigns—has been far greater, despite a substantially weaker evidentiary case.

The disparity is visible in UN institutional outputs:

• Between 2015 and 2024, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) passed 173 resolutions targeting Israel—more than double the 80 passed against all other countries combined.

• In 2024 alone, Israel received 17 UNGA condemnations; Myanmar received one, and Ethiopia received none.

• Since the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) founding in 2006, Israel has been the subject of 112 resolutions; Myanmar, 34. The Tigray conflict—which produced casualty estimates in the hundreds of thousands—generated exactly one UNHRC resolution, passed by a vote of 20 to 14.

• Myanmar did not receive its first UN Security Council resolution until December 2022, more than a decade after atrocities began.

When a legal standard is applied to one party with an intensity not replicated in cases presenting stronger evidence, the disparity demands explanation; political animus is a plausible one.

Rhetorical pattern: Without evidentiary support, the accusation of “genocide” against the Jewish state often functions as a way of delegitimizing Jewish sovereignty. It draws on a centuries-old pattern that characterizes Jewish conduct as uniquely evil and civilizationally threatening. That pattern has a name—and it is older than the modern state it now targets.

Old Script, New Language

The accusation that Jews commit the worst imaginable crimes against innocents is not new. What changes is the language used to express it. In medieval Europe, it took the form of the blood libel: Jews were said to murder Christian children for ritual purposes. In the early twentieth century, it became the conspiracy of Jewish world domination. Today, in the language of international human rights law, the charge is genocide. While the vocabulary shifts, the structure does not.

In most accusations, evidence precedes the charge. Here, the charge precedes everything—constructed to justify persecution rather than respond to it. The objective remains the same: to strip Jews of legitimacy and justify exclusion or worse. In the case of Israel, the target is political legitimacy—the right to exist as a sovereign state.

The form this takes today—the one most directly driving the genocide accusation against Israel—has a specific name: “Holocaust inversion.” It depicts Jews and Israel as the “new Nazis” and Palestinians as the “new Jews,” using Holocaust language (genocide, ghetto, extermination) to recast Jews as perpetrators of the crimes once committed against them.

This inversion also explains how the term “genocide” detaches from evidence. Once Israel is positioned as a Nazi analogue, the conclusion is already embedded in the frame, and the accusation follows almost automatically.

The pattern is not new to the post-October 7 moment. As Norman Goda documents, virtually identical accusations—Nazi comparisons, blood libel tropes, charges of Jewish manipulation of Western governments—were leveled at Israel in the UN General Assembly during the 1982 Lebanon War, by states whose own forces had committed mass atrocities they were simultaneously refusing to acknowledge.

For European audiences in particular, inversion serves an additional function. In Germany and Austria, it displaces unresolved guilt about the Shoah onto Israel. In Britain, Ireland, and much of Western Europe, the operative framework is colonial—Israel is conscripted into a postcolonial lens through which these societies process their own imperial histories.

South Africa is the sharpest case: a country whose apartheid past gives the genocide accusation both moral authority and psychological utility, allowing it to position itself as the conscience of the oppressed while deflecting continued scrutiny of its own present failures of governance. After all, it was South Africa that brought forth the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case.

In the United States, the frame shifts again: Israel becomes the stand-in for white settler colonialism, Palestinians for the dispossessed, and the conflict gets absorbed into domestic narratives about race and structural inequality.

In each case, the memory of Jewish victimhood is repurposed into a justification.

How Words Lose Their Meaning

When a technical term moves from a professional setting—where clear criteria govern its use—into political discourse, it often stops functioning the same way. “Genocide” is a case in point.

In law, the term has a specific threshold, including the requirement to demonstrate intent. In activist contexts, it is increasingly used as a general marker of moral condemnation. This is more than semantic drift, as the two usages now compete.

When a legal scholar argues that the available evidence does not meet the Convention’s threshold for genocide, the response is often a label: apologist, “Zionist” (deployed as a slur), defender of ethnic cleansing. The claim is not refuted; the speaker is disqualified. Once that happens, the argument no longer needs to be answered.

This is the breakdown of shared standards of evaluation. Credibility is withdrawn based on who the speaker is presumed to be, rather than on the strength of the argument itself. The result is the removal of the conditions under which a disagreement could be meaningfully resolved.

When the Courtroom Joins In

As the meaning of “genocide” shifts in public discourse, it begins to move upward into legal and institutional settings, acquiring the appearance of authority along the way.

Ireland’s submission to the ICJ, urging the court to “broaden” its interpretation of the Convention to include collective punishment, is one example. Such proposals would effectively weaken or bypass the intent requirement. When states press courts in this direction, the Convention’s structure comes under pressure from above. In that environment, insisting on the existing legal standard can begin to look like a political act rather than a legal one.

A growing body of legal scholarship argues that sustained structural domination or cultural destruction should fall within genocide’s scope. The moral concern is real: the slow erosion of a group’s social existence can produce devastating harm. But international law already contains categories designed to address such conduct—crimes against humanity, persecution, cultural destruction—that do not require proof of eliminationist intent.

Expanding the definition of genocide to capture these harms risks minimizing important distinctions. It also raises a basic legal problem: redefining a crime in the midst of an accusation violates the principle of nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without law).

Efforts to expand the Convention’s definition to fit accusations against Israel are not new. During the Convention’s own drafting in 1948, Syria proposed amendments specifically designed to bring Israeli conduct within the definition’s scope—and was rejected by a vote of twenty-nine to five. The definition was deliberately written not to fit the accusation.

The pressure to expand the term has also been uneven. There has been no similar campaign around China’s repression of Uyghur cultural and religious life or Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian identity in occupied territories. When a standard expands in one case but not in others, the discrepancy cannot be explained by legal reasoning alone.

A more serious challenge comes from scholars who argue that the intent requirement sets the bar so high that the Convention becomes difficult to enforce. But intent is rarely explicit; it must be inferred from patterns of conduct, official statements, and systematic effects. International tribunals, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Srebrenica cases, have relied on such inference to establish genocidal intent.

The argument has limits, which become clear in the application to Israel. The ICJ’s provisional measures ruling in South Africa v. Israel (January 2024) is often cited as institutional validation of the genocide claim, but that reading conflates two distinct thresholds.

The Court found that South Africa had standing and that Palestinians have a plausible right to protection under the Convention, but it did not find that genocide is plausibly occurring. That distinction drove the outcome: a plausible right to protection can arise wherever a group faces serious harm, but a finding of plausible genocide requires evidence meeting the Convention’s intent standard. The Court therefore declined to order a ceasefire and made no determination that genocide was occurring or had occurred.

When Jews Call It Genocide

When Jewish scholars of the Holocaust level the genocide charge against Israel, it appears to close off the antisemitism argument entirely. The appearance is misleading.

The structure described here operates at the level of argument, not identity. It concerns how claims are formed and justified: verdict before evidence, selective application, and the use of Holocaust memory against Jewish sovereignty. A scholar shaped by postcolonial theory, activist academic culture, and the pressures of the post–October 7 environment can adopt this logic without endorsing its origins; this holds regardless of whether the scholar is Jewish.

The case of Omer Bartov is illustrative. Bartov holds the Samuel Pisar Chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. In 2004, he described student protesters equating Zionism with Nazism as engaging in “virulent antisemitism.” In 2010, he argued in the Journal of Genocide Research that labeling Israel’s 1948 actions as genocide “empties the term of historical meaning.” By 2024, he was accusing Israel of “genocidal actions” in The Guardian and lecturing at anti-Israel campus encampments. At a University of Maryland lecture in April 2025, with the full text of the 1948 Genocide Convention projected behind him, he explained why:

Genocide is a legal term. I use that term in debates now because I know, I see the immense urge to deny… But for the people in Gaza, do you think it really matters if you call it genocide or war crimes? We need to use that terminology because we are talking to another public… who cares what you call it.

Sabrina Soffer, then a senior undergraduate completing her thesis on the erosion of boundaries between scholarship and activism, was in the audience that evening and questioned Bartov directly. Her account of the exchange makes explicit what is usually left implicit: the accusation is not the conclusion of an inquiry. It is a rhetorical instrument, selected for its effect on “another public”—and deployed by a scholar who knows the legal standard does not fit.

The result, as Norman Goda argues in “The Genocide Libel,” is a field in which the definition of genocide is adjusted to fit the accusation—turning a legal standard into an instrument.

When credentialed scholars deploy the accusation in this way, it has a compounding effect: it appears to neutralize the charge of antisemitism while shifting suspicion onto those who insist on legal standards.

Meaning Everything but Nothing

Each effort to bypass the intent requirement lowers the evidentiary threshold for one of international law’s most serious charges. When the definition expands to meet the accusation, legal institutions risk becoming instruments of political judgment rather than constraints on it.

The overextension of the term also produces moral fatigue. The Rwandan genocide, Srebrenica, and the Islamic State’s campaign against the Yazidis were adjudicated under the Convention’s specific criteria. When conflicts lacking evidence of eliminationist intent receive the same label, the term loses its force. Its capacity to mobilize attention and action weakens, and genuine cases risk being obscured.

The result is a collapse of proportion. “Genocide” was coined to describe the deliberate destruction of a people. Applying it to contexts that do not meet that threshold flattens distinctions the concept was designed to preserve. A vocabulary that cannot distinguish between different forms of violence stops functioning as a tool of judgment.

The asymmetry sharpens the problem. Hamas’ founding charter explicitly calls for the killing of Jews—not Israeli soldiers or policymakers, but Jews. That is eliminationist language in the sense the Convention was designed to capture. Yet it often receives less sustained attention than accusations directed at Israel. When the term “genocide” consistently moves toward one party and away from another, it is no longer tracking evidence. It is tracking something else.

Reclaiming “genocide” as a precise legal and moral category is an obligation to the victims of actual genocides, whose experience is diluted each time the term is extended beyond its evidential warrant. It is also an obligation to the legal architecture Lemkin built from the wreckage of his people’s annihilation—because a word that can be made to mean anything ends up protecting no one.

Sources

Greenblatt, Jonathan. “The Weaponization of the Holocaust Against Israel.” Anti-Defamation League, May 5, 2024.

Goda, Norman J.W. “The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel with Genocide.” ISCA Research Paper 2025-3. Bloomington: Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University, February 2025.

New Lines Institute. Genocide in Tigray: Serious Breaches of International Law in the Tigray Conflict. Washington, DC: New Lines Institute, June 2024.

Ringrose, Michelle E. “The Politicization of the Genocide Label.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 14, no. 1 (2020): 72–91.

Sacks, Gavriel. “The Dangers of Holocaust Inversion.” Times of Israel, January 20, 2025. Republished by the Pinsker Centre.

Schabas, William A. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Soffer, Sabrina. Omer Bartov and the Politics of Holocaust Memory: From Activism to Historiography — and Back Again. ISGAP Occasional Paper Series no. 8/2026. New York: Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, 2026.

Ullmann, Stephen. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Zerilli, Linda M. G. “Post-Truth Politics and Collective Gaslighting.” Episteme 20, no. 1 (2023): 1–21.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

Every nation carries a story about itself—one that explains where it came from, what it has endured, and why it deserves recognition. These stories are powerful because they become a lens through which the past and present are understood, and their repetition fortifies the conviction that the story is not just a narrative but the truth itself.

I want to tell you the story of two communities, but before naming them, I’d like you to notice their similarities. This isn’t a trick, but names carry weight and sometimes prevent us from hearing the facts on their own terms.

Two Communities

In the first community, neighbors who had lived side by side for generations turned on one another in a single day of extraordinary violence. Men, women, and children were murdered in their homes by people who knew them by name; the killings were carried out by neighbors. Within days, the community’s leadership denied the atrocities had occurred at all, blamed the victims for provoking the violence, and insisted the eyewitness testimony was fabricated propaganda. The men convicted and executed for the killings were absorbed into national memory as heroes. Their execution date became a day of annual commemoration, and state and movement narratives, including school materials, honored the convicted killers as martyrs of the national struggle.

In the second community, a similar act of neighbor violence unfolded under wartime conditions. Men, women, and children—again, people known to their killers—were rounded up, beaten, and burned alive. Although the killings occurred under occupation, they were not simply ordered and executed by the occupying power. Yet, for decades afterward, the community maintained that the atrocity had been committed entirely by outsiders. When a historian published evidence to the contrary, the response caused a societal rupture: accusations of betrayal, claims that the evidence was exaggerated or fabricated, and a fierce institutional effort to reassert the community’s identity as victim rather than perpetrator.

These two cases are not equivalent: one involves a stateless people living under ongoing displacement; the other involves a sovereign nation with institutional control over its own memory. The structural conditions differ enormously, which is why the pattern feels instructive: violence by neighbors, followed by denial, followed by the absorption of perpetrators into a narrative of collective victimhood. While the cases operate across such different circumstances, the similarity of their responses suggests that what we are looking at is a feature of how national stories work; it’s not just about politics.

You may have recognized one or both of these communities. The first is the Palestinian response to the 1929 Hebron massacre. The second is the Polish response to the 1941 Jedwabne massacre. If you did recognize them, notice what happened in your mind at the moment of recognition—did the facts change, or did the frame around them shift? Did you feel yourself wanting to stop reading?

What Happened

On August 24, 1929, in the ancient city of Hebron—Judaism’s second holiest city, where roughly 800 Jews lived among 20,000 Muslims—a mob incited by rumors that Jews planned to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque attacked the Jewish community. Over the course of two days, sixty-seven Jews were murdered and dozens more wounded. Victims were stabbed, bludgeoned, and in some cases mutilated by people who had been their neighbors, shopkeepers, and friends. At the same time, nearly two dozen Arab men and women risked their own lives to shelter Jewish neighbors from the mob; at least 250 Jews and their descendants owe their survival to those rescuers. The British evacuated the surviving Jews, ending a continuous Jewish presence in Hebron that had persisted for centuries.

On July 10, 1941, in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet-occupied eastern territories, Polish townspeople rounded up their Jewish neighbors—men, women, and children—beat them, drove them into a barn, and set it on fire. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to sixteen hundred; what is not contested is the near-total character of the killing. Only a handful of Jews survived the day.

If Hebron's story contains a small but honored place for rescuers, Jedwabne's does not. The killing was so nearly total, and the postwar silence so deep, that the only "righteous" figures we can name are villagers who hid a handful of survivors after the massacre—people later beaten or driven out for their efforts. For half a century, a monument in Jedwabne attributed the massacre to the German Gestapo. It was not until 2001, when the historian Jan Gross published Neighbors, drawing on survivor testimony and wartime trial records, that the role of Polish perpetrators entered public knowledge—and ignited a national crisis over what Poland owed its own history.

Deadly Sacred

Both communities absorbed these events in a way that made the violence feel explicable and necessary, reflecting a core feature of what Robert Bellah calls “civil religion.” This helps explain how national stories work: much like theology, nations construct sacred stories that bind meaning to motivation, make collective suffering purposeful, and render it both intelligible and, in some sense, sufferable.

In Palestinian memory, the men executed for their role in the 1929 violence are celebrated as some of the first martyrs of the national cause, their letters and popular poems portraying them as heroes who gladly gave their souls for the homeland. In the Polish case, Catholic messianism casts the nation as a “Christ among nations,” suffering not just historically but redemptively. Once suffering is sanctified in this way, these frameworks do not just support the political argument—they are the political argument, and revision feels more like desecration than correction.

Political consequences follow from the sacred structure. Sanctified victimhood can win international sympathy, tighten bonds at home, and justify present-day positions that are not grounded in history. It can also harden into the defensive form of civil religion that Bellah warned about—a story so tightly sealed that no new information can get in.

In Hebron, the same massacre is taught in Israeli classrooms alongside stories of the Arab families who sheltered their Jewish neighbors from the mob. In much of Palestinian public memory, Jews who once lived in Hebron, and the 1929 massacre itself, barely appear; Jewish neighbors have been largely erased from the story.

The Cost of a Story

Studying the Polish response to Jedwabne, the psychologist Krystyna Skarżyńska pointed to the core difficulty: it is almost structurally impossible to accept cruelty committed by one’s own community when that community’s identity rests on seeing itself solely as a victim. Jan Gerber calls this a “dialectic of victimhood,” where acknowledging one group’s suffering shrinks the moral space available to others and turns remembrance into a competition.

Together, these dynamics explain why evidence of neighbor violence so often fails to produce genuine reckoning. The narrative does not reject the evidence outright. It reorganizes it—reframing perpetrators as defenders, recasting atrocities as provocations, absorbing the uncomfortable facts into a story that leaves the community’s moral self-image intact. In both cases, the victims who disappear from the story are Jewish, so at what point does a pattern harden into a structure?

None of this is unique to Palestinians or Poles. Nations, like individuals, tend to remember what affirms them and reinterpret what challenges them. The question is not whether this happens—it does—but whether there is room to hold complexity.

See Thy Neighbor

What would it look like for a national story to include both suffering and responsibility? To acknowledge not only what was done to “us,” but also what was done by “us”—and what was done for us, by people on the other side?

In Hebron’s Jewish Museum, alongside the names of the dead, there is a section dedicated to the Arab families who risked their lives to shelter their Jewish neighbors from the mob. The museum was established by settlers, among the most nationalist Israelis in the country, and yet it holds space for the humanity on the other side. Yardena Schwartz, who spent years reporting on both communities in Hebron, writes that she often tried to imagine how different life would be if that kind of recognition could exist in Palestinian society—their suffering honored without erasing the history of the Jewish people in this land. “But what if?” she asks. “Is it too naive to wish?”

If there is hope here, it is one Bellah himself held, even as he recognized the odds against it: that each tradition holds resources for renewal, and that the covenant a nation makes with its own past can be renegotiated—not by abandoning the story, but by making it large enough to hold what it has excluded.

I am grateful to Joanna Michlic and Yardena Schwartz for the extraordinary work they have done on Jedwabne and Hebron, respectively—scholarship and reporting on which this essay depends.

Sources

• Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America." Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. ———. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

• Gerber, Jan. “The Competition of Victims: On Postcolonialism and Holocaust Remembrance.” Telos, January 27, 2025.

• Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

• Schwartz, Yardena. Ghosts of a Holy War: A Reporter, a Lost Generation, and the Untold Story of the Hebron Massacre. New York: Dutton, 2024.

• Skarżyńska, Krystyna. “Zbiorowa wyobraźnia, współna wina” [Collective Imagination, Common Guilt]. Gazeta Wyborcza, November 25–26, 2000. Cited in Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

In highly charged public controversies, moral gravity can reshape the structure of discourse itself. The shift is subtle, and it does not always appear as censorship or dogma. Rather, it looks like urgency, solidarity, or moral clarity. More importantly, it feels right.

But what happens when urgency and moral certainty drift out of alignment with the facts, when the atmosphere becomes so charged that even asking “Is it true?” feels dangerous?

When that happens, standards by which claims are evaluated begin to shift. The social cost of questioning can replace the logical conditions of truth, as agreement starts to track moral alignment rather than evidence. This is the moment to ask, “What would count as enough evidence, and what would count against it?”

There is a simple idea of truth that was proposed in the 1930s by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski:

“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.

It sounds almost banal, but read it again. Notice how the left-hand side is a sentence, and the right-hand side describes a state of affairs — what is true in the world. Here, the “if and only if” functions as a bridge that connects language to reality.

Tarski’s schema isn’t a practical way to investigate a claim or resolve moral disputes. But it matters because we have reached a point in contemporary discourse where what is real in the world is often doubted, especially when moral urgency is high.

In such situations, it would make sense to pause and ask, “Are there possible ways the world could be that would make a claim false?” If the answer is yes, the next question is, “Is it ok to even ask?”

The first question requires a logical check, and the second question requires courage. Both questions are important.

When Asking Feels Dangerous

It is possible for a claim to be logically falsifiable yet socially insulated, meaning telling the truth can feel lonely and often unsafe.

Consider a controversy in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Les Wexner’s long association with Jeffrey Epstein has received significant public attention. Epstein’s crimes were horrific, and Wexner has been subpoenaed in related proceedings. To my knowledge, he has not been criminally charged.

In 2011, Wexner made the largest single donation ever to The Ohio State University, and the university honored him by renaming the medical center and placing his name on university buildings. However, considering the Epstein crimes, there is growing demand that his name be removed.

That demand rests on an empirical claim: that Wexner knew of, facilitated, or bears responsibility for Epstein’s actions in a way that would justify institutional repudiation.

Under ordinary truth conditions, that claim would be true only if such knowledge, facilitation, or responsibility can be established.

The Cost of Questioning

I’ve been tempted to ask, “Isn’t removing the name without confirmation of guilt premature?” But I stop myself because I know how easily that question could be read as loyalty to power or indifference to survivors. In a climate like this, asking for evidence can look like moral failure.

When the expectation of evidence is treated as proof that someone does not care about what survivors have endured, we are in a condition I call normative override. It marks the point at which the demand that claims answer to the world is replaced by a demand for moral alignment — when moral valence substitutes for the truth conditions a claim would ordinarily require.

Here’s what this shift looks like:

Is it true?

becomes

Is it wrong to question it?

Epstein’s crimes were so grave that hesitation can look like complicity. But moral seriousness cannot replace evidential evaluation. When questioning itself becomes suspect, decisions begin to reflect pressure rather than proof.

Why Silence Stabilizes

This shift from “is it true?” to “is it ok to ask?” is supported by basic human incentive structures. When publicly asking for evidentiary thresholds carries reputational cost — accusations of defending power, minimizing harm, or betraying victims — while remaining silent carries little cost, silence becomes the rational strategy. My hesitation to ask, “Is it really true about Wexner?” reflects this cost.

Under those conditions, conformity does not require enforcement. It emerges because deviation is costly.

You may remember the scene from A Beautiful Mind in which John Nash realizes that when each person’s choice depends on everyone else’s, a stable pattern can form. Once that pattern sets in, the incentive to act alone — even to improve the outcome — largely disappears.

Something similar happens in morally charged controversies. If asking for evidence carries reputational risk while silence does not, each person has reason to wait. Even if many privately believe standards should be articulated, no one wants to incur the penalty of being first. Silence becomes individually rational, and the pattern stabilizes.

That is incentive-stabilized conformity; it allows claims to solidify without being tested.

Solidarity and Standards

There is a countervailing reality that explains how normative override can feel justified. Historically, survivors of sexual exploitation and abuse have often been dismissed or disbelieved. Miranda Fricker’s concept of “testimonial injustice” captures this phenomenon in which certain speakers suffer credibility deficits because of identity-based prejudice. Correcting those distortions is an epistemic requirement as much as a moral one. José Medina extends this analysis by arguing that those who experience structural harm often develop heightened sensitivity to the patterns that harm produces; thus, lived experience can sharpen perception.

I agree with Fricker and Medina: centering marginalized voices is essential because it improves collective understanding. These are indispensable insights.

However, when the moral commitment to take survivors seriously is conflated with lowering evidentiary standards, truth begins to drift because claims about responsibility are accepted without specifying what evidence would confirm or disconfirm them.

Centering survivors does not require suspending truth conditions, as credibility and proof are separate categories. A survivor can be granted full moral seriousness while specific claims about responsibility are evaluated against articulated criteria. Requiring evidence entails specifying what must be established for a claim about responsibility to be true and what would count as revision; it is not about disbelieving survivors.

Standards and Legitimacy

Even when a university is not acting as a court, it is exercising judgment. But judgment requires articulated criteria and a process capable of applying them. Otherwise, action becomes symbolic rather than evaluative.

Exposure to allegations does not make us judges. Hearing a claim and determining responsibility are distinct acts, and institutional legitimacy depends on preserving that distinction. When it erodes, decisions begin to track moral intensity rather than the conditions that would make a claim true.

Tethered To The World

Tarski’s formulation is austere for a reason: it keeps claims tethered to the world. A statement is true if and only if the world is as the statement says it is. That discipline prevents moral urgency from substituting for evaluation.

Hannah Arendt warned that when people lose their grip on reality, they become easier to control. In morally charged contexts, the temptation to let seriousness stand in for evidence is powerful, but the discipline of truth is a precondition for justice. When this discipline breaks down, institutions lose credibility.

A culture capable of both solidarity and rigor does not need to choose between believing survivors and specifying evidence. It can do both.

Sources

• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973.

• Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

• Nash, John. “Non-Cooperative Games.” Annals of Mathematics 54, no. 2 (1951).

• Tarski, Alfred. “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1944): 341–375.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

We’ve all walked into rooms where the interpretation of who we are arrives first, where our motives were assigned in advance, our speech predecoded and our emotions preclassified. It’s destabilizing, as if with each step you take, the ground slides. And that’s the point of the room — not to understand you, but to keep you unstable.

This isn’t about one bad conversation; it’s about a system, an interpretive machine that assigns meaning in advance, then reorganizes everything it sees so the assignment can never be falsified. And once you’re inside it, you feel the rules.

The Paradox That Shouldn’t Be Possible

Here’s the logical impossibility that gnaws at me: How can a single group of people be described as weak, parasitic, and cowardly, and at the same time, omnipotent? The hidden hand behind banks, revolutions, wars, media, modernity itself? The powerless contaminant and the global puppeteer — Schrödinger’s scapegoat, hated as nothing and hated as everything.

Our instinct is to ask: which is it? Bankers or Bolsheviks? Decadent capitalists or subversive communists? Oppressors or oppressed?

But I think that asking the question is a trap, because this isn’t a dispute about facts; it’s a dispute about the rules by which conclusions are allowed to change. It’s about what a system permits you to count as evidence, what it disqualifies in advance, and what it makes impossible to know.

That’s epistemic capture, and when you ask “which is it,” you’ve already conceded the wrong terrain.

The Broken Printer

Think of it this way: you’re trying to use a broken printer. The document you send represents your lived experience, your actual words, your intentions, but it never prints the way you intended. You adjust the settings, tinker with the formatting, and try again. But the output keeps coming out wrong garbled, distorted, and backward.

So what do you do? You don’t keep pressing print or staring at the page hoping it’ll fix itself. You pry open the plastic casing and hunt down the manual so you can look at the mechanism.

That’s what I’m trying to do here: stop arguing with the printout and look at the mechanism — antisemitism as an interpretive system with built-in self-confirmation.

Social theorist Moishe Postone gives us its engineering diagram: a structural explanation for why modern antisemitism functions differently from other forms of hatred. Historian Bruce Mazlish gives us the operating conditions: how mass psychology becomes history, how shared fantasies become public moods, and eventually social common sense.

When you combine Postone’s structural account with Mazlish’s analysis of collective defenses, you can see what you’re dealing with: a self-sealing interpretive system — structural in its logic, psychological in its energy.

Why Scapegoating Doesn’t Explain the Holocaust

Most of us grew up with a common-sense story about scapegoating: times are hard, a society needs someone to blame, so it picks a vulnerable minority, pins the crisis on them, and vents rage downward. That story explains many forms of hatred and persecution throughout history.

But it does not fully explain the Holocaust.

In the final years of the war, when Germany was desperate for transport and manpower, the regime still diverted capacity to deport Jews to extermination camps. Extermination took precedence.

This is what it looks like when a society believes it is fighting an existential enemy whose destruction matters more than victory itself. Jews weren’t being scapegoated for a crisis; they were being treated as a metaphysical threat. The killing wasn’t instrumental… it was redemptive.

Saul Friedländer coined the term “redemptive antisemitism” to describe the belief that Jewish destruction is necessary for salvation. I’m tempted to call the final step redemptive killing: the moment extermination becomes the point, not the means. The moment when facts can no longer function as correction, because they’re answering to a framework that operates at a different level entirely. What Jews are, say, or do becomes immaterial. Jewish existence itself blocks redemption; it has nothing to do with behaviors.

The killing becomes logical because disproof is no longer an available category.

The Structure: How Capitalism Creates a Faceless Enemy

So why does the system so often take the form of conspiracy? Why is it about the obsession with invisible domination, hidden plots, secret control?

Postone’s answer drops one level down to the structure of modern social experience itself.

Under capitalism, power is lived in two registers at once. One is the concrete world of production: labor, factories, machines, the visible work of making things. The other is the abstract world of circulation: finance, credit, interest rates, the impersonal logic that seems to move everything while remaining untouchable.

In reality, these dimensions are inseparable, as production depends on circulation and circulation depends on production. But we don’t experience them that way… we experience them as split.

Think about losing your job. That’s concrete — you know the building, the boss, the day it happened. But why did it happen? “Market forces,” “the economy,” “restructuring.” Those words feel real, but you can’t touch them —you can’t march on “the market” or punch “interest rates” in the face.

Capitalism generates power that governs your life without a body — faceless, impersonal, everywhere. And faceless power produces a craving for a face: someone to blame, someone to point at, someone to hate. When suffering is structural, it becomes a cognitive itch, because “this is how the system works” is harder to metabolize than “someone is doing this to us.”

Modern antisemitism has an answer: “the Jew.”

Once “the Jew” is cast as the carrier of abstract domination — the personification of finance, speculation, rootless cosmopolitanism—contradiction stops functioning as falsification. Instead, it becomes evidence of the enemy’s mutability. The target isn’t a person you can investigate; it’s an explanatory slot that must remain filled.

Postone describes a Nazi propaganda image that captures the entire psychosis: a strong German worker — sleeves rolled up, rooted in the soil, productive—threatened from the west by a plutocratic capitalist in a top hat, and from the east by a Bolshevik commissar with a rifle. And above them both, pulling the strings: “the Jew.”

It doesn’t make sense. A Jew can’t be both the capitalist and the communist, both the decadent parasite and the revolutionary threat. But sense-making isn’t the point: “the Jew” becomes a single explanatory object that can absorb every crisis, fear, and contradiction.

The Loop: Why Contradiction Becomes Proof

Here’s the twist: contradiction doesn’t weaken the claim; it fortifies it.

You might recognize this pattern from a more intimate scale. If you’ve ever been in a toxic family structure, you know how this works and how the designated problem person can’t win. If they’re quiet, it’s sullenness; if they speak up, it’s aggression; and if they try to fix things, it’s manipulation. The role is the point — someone has to carry the blame so the system doesn’t have to look at itself. Then, every action gets converted into evidence that confirms the original assignment. This isn’t to psychologize history; it’s to name a recognizably unfalsifiable role-structure.

What happens in dysfunctional families also happens in societies. The same structural need for a blame-carrier, just scaled up. Across contexts and across centuries, inconsistent accusations don’t count as disproof; they’re treated as evidence of the enemy’s adaptability, cunning, chameleonic nature. The system reads reality through a converter that guarantees every input confirms the original suspicion.

Watch the same loop play out in three different moments:

Dreyfus, 1890s France: A Jewish officer insists on his innocence. The insistence is read as calculation. Calculation confirms suspicion.

Poland, 1968: A Jew (“Zionist infiltrator”) demonstrates ideological loyalty to the communist state. Loyalty is read as infiltration. Infiltration confirms suspicion.

After October 7, 2023: Jews name fear and grief in public. Naming is read as propaganda. Propaganda confirms suspicion.

Different centuries, different political systems, the same conversion process: input > interpretive grid > confirmation.

When contradictions emerge, the system converts them into proof of the enemy’s ability to disguise itself, and once installed, the interpretive machine can mutate indefinitely while preserving its function.

Mazlish, drawing on historian Norman Cohn, helps explain how a fabricated explanatory object hardens into warrant. Fantasies — the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, hidden plots to control the world — can escalate into beliefs that authorize extermination. Once the framework is in place, it doesn’t need new evidence because it generates its own.

How a System Holds at Scale

A reasonable objection: the Holocaust wasn’t one person’s delusion; it was a social reality. Millions participated, collaborated, or looked away. So how does a psychological dynamic become historical force?

Mazlish is useful because he shows, methodically, how private fantasies scale into public moods. Group psychology isn’t a pile of separate pathologies; it spreads by imitation, suggestion, and moral contagion until it starts producing its own corroboration. The danger isn’t merely error, but the degradation of corrective feedback. A collective mood becomes a permission structure — tilting interpretation toward escalation, filtering reality through fantasy, and naming the fantasy “realism.”

Postone has a term for what happens next: sleepwalking — an insistence on not wanting to know. Evidence can be present and still fail to count. How else could people live next to a concentration camp and claim ignorance? It’s not that information is unavailable; rather, acknowledging it would collapse the self-image that makes ordinary life possible. The facts are there; it’s just that the community has made them unusable.

That’s what it looks like when epistemic possibility narrows through collective defense: the group protects itself from unbearable truths by rendering certain kinds of knowledge socially illegitimate, morally suspect, or psychologically impossible to hold.

The Reassignment of Roles

Here’s where it gets contemporary.

Postone’s most diagnostically valuable analysis concerns the post-1967 New Left — the moment when parts of the global left began reframing Israel and Jews within a moral binary of oppressor and oppressed.

Context matters here: In June 1967, Israel faced what appeared to be an imminent coordinated attack. Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers, blockaded Israeli shipping, and massed troops on the border while forming a military alliance with Jordan and Syria. The war lasted six days, Israel survived, and in surviving, captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Before 1967, Israel could still be narrated as David: a small, vulnerable state surrounded by hostile neighbors, a refuge for Holocaust survivors, the underdog. After the Six-Day War, that story became harder to tell because Israel now controlled territory and had military power. It had won decisively.

For parts of the global left invested in the idea that moral clarity flows from identifying with the powerless, this created a category problem. But prioritization doesn’t automatically guard against antisemitism; it can actually provide a mechanism for it, by flipping the moral roles as soon as Jews are no longer readable as vulnerable.

Jewish sovereignty, Jewish military capability, Jewish self-defense: a disruptive trifecta on the category map. Rather than revise the map, the framework relabels the actors —“Victim” and “Oppressor.” It works because these aren’t neutral descriptions; they’re structural roles that sort the world into the binary that the moral system depends on. Without clear heroes and villains, the logic falters, and it can feel like the ground drops away. Add complexity and moral certainty dissolves; the simple story that made action feel self-evident stops being simple.

What It Feels Like to Be the Target

This isn't just theoretical. When you're inside the machine, you feel it — what people assume before you speak, what they’re ready to hear, and what they’ve already decided your words will mean.

So what do you do? You try to adapt by monitoring your tone, context, and affect. You try to speak the language of the room, hoping not to trigger the misreading. And then you realize: the misreading is the point. The system is built so that any move you make can be converted into confirmation.

Try to defend yourself calmly; you’re calculating.
Get angry, you’re aggressive.
Call out the pattern, you’re paranoid.

At that point, you’re defending more than yourself… you’re defending the very possibility that your defense could count.

Interpretive Interruption

So what should we do?

If Postone is right that modern antisemitism has a mission-quality — a drive toward annihilation, a personification of abstraction that makes the target metaphysically necessary — then better information won’t be enough. If Mazlish is right that group moods can become self-propelling, the problem isn’t simply argument. It’s containment: preserving the conditions under which reality can correct fantasy.

That’s interpretive interruption: refusing the frame that pre-decides what Jewish speech can mean and insisting that facts be permitted to matter. We must demand that Jewish self-description be allowed to count.

But here’s the turn that matters most: interpretive interruption isn’t only something Jews ask of the outside world. It’s also a discipline Jews owe themselves — not as self-blame, but as a question of what sovereignty makes possible.

I’ve been reading Robert Katz’s Antisemitism and the Law, which examines Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohn’s dissent in the Rufeisen case — a dispute over who counts as a Jew for citizenship, and thus over what sort of Jewish state Israel meant to become.

Cohn wasn’t only arguing law; he was issuing a moral warning about what trauma can do once Jews finally have sovereignty. His question haunts me: Does Jewish power require reproducing the exclusionary logic once used against Jews? Or is sovereignty precisely the ability to refuse that inheritance?

Cohn’s deeper point may be epistemic. If the state defines Jewishness primarily in opposition to Christianity — if Jewish identity is constructed as not-Christian, against-Christian — then the Christian world remains the measuring instrument. The old antagonist keeps veto power over the terms, even in the afterlife of antagonism.

Trauma becomes the author of identity.

This feels related to what I’ve been wrestling with: antisemitism doesn’t just misread Jews; it narrows what can count as Jewish meaning in the first place. And I worry we can sometimes reproduce a version of that narrowing inwardly, when Jewishness becomes defined mostly through enemies, exile, and response.

The world tells us who we are by telling us what we aren’t. And when we internalize that grammar, we can end up carrying the machine forward ourselves, even with the best intentions.

The alternative isn’t forgetting, and it isn’t pretending the threat isn’t real. I think it’s authorship: refusing to let vigilance become identity and refusing to let inherited antagonism set the limits of Jewish meaning. Interpretive interruption — outward and inward — means widening the aperture: making room for complexity, desire, and creation, for a Jewish life that can defend itself without being organized entirely by defense.

Sources
Mazlish, Bruce. “What Is Psycho-History?” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 1–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3678921.

Postone, Moishe. “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust.’” New German Critique, no. 19 (Winter 1980): 97–115. https://www.jstor.org/stable/487974.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

(A field note from work-in-progress to be presented at the 2026 Contemporary Antisemitism Conference in Haifa; this piece focuses on one line of inquiry rather than the full argument.)

On a road near Ardee in County Louth, Ireland, someone spray-painted swastikas, Stars of David and the words “Jew Rat” onto the asphalt. Gardaí have opened a hate crime investigation, and Louth County Council has condemned the imagery and said it will be removed as quickly as possible.

The paint will come off. What stays, at least for me, is a question of legibility: what makes a swastika feel culturally usable in public space right now?

I want to offer a modest claim, with respect for how much scholarship already exists on this subject. The debate over whether something is “antizionism” or “antisemitism” matters for law, policy and institutional response. Yet it often arrives after something more basic has already taken place: a role has been assigned to Jews, and the assignment presents itself as settled. I’m not arguing that Jews cause other people’s crises. I’m arguing that Jews are often used to organize them.

So the question I keep coming back to sits above taxonomy: what kind of social interpretation is happening in real time, and what does our language miss when it jumps straight to categories? What I want to foreground is the sequence: not only what an incident is, but what interpretive work it performs before classification begins.

Meaning happens fast

Public argument, at its best, moves through claims, reasons, evidence and the possibility of correction. But a swastika skips that process, arriving as verdict and compressing complexity into a single instruction: treat this as though it’s already decided. This does not mean that the symbol functions identically in every context, or that all audiences receive it in the same way. Rather, it means that the symbol arrives preloaded with a historically sedimented range of meanings that sharply constrain what interpretation can plausibly do next.

Placed alongside a Star of David, it makes Jewishness the canvas for that verdict; paired with “Jew” and “Rat,” it taps an extermination-era grammar in which Jews appear as contagion and threat. The “rat” trope has a specific history in the Nazi visual lexicon, including the infamous “rats” sequence in Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), which compares Jews to rats carrying disease.

Read that way, the road reveals more — a map unfolds on the asphalt: a template with routes already charted, ready to carry the next incident straight into an older story.

As sociologist Shaul Kelner asks, Can anyone make the case that these behaviors are disconnected? That we are seeing coincidence and not pattern?”

Portability is the point

One claim keeps resurfacing: antisemitism is unusually portable—it travels across time, place and ideology. My claim is that it does so because it functions as an interpretive template, a ready-made way of assigning meaning that can latch onto new events and fold them into an older moral story. Imagine autocorrect: type something different, but it keeps snapping your words back into the same familiar phrase, even when it’s wrong.

But portability alone does not explain why such symbols are chosen in the first place. Their usability also reflects perceived rewards: shock value, transgressive credibility (aka edgy clout), algorithmic amplification and the moral inversion that allows aggression to masquerade as critique.

David Nirenberg helps explain why the “snap-back” persists. He describes anti-Judaism as “a way of thinking,” a conceptual tool that can organize how reality gets interpreted: not simply bias or prejudice, but a ready structure for making sense of events. In other words, the interpretive work is already partly done before any particular event arrives. This inherited grammar helps explain antisemitism’s endurance: its ability to persist through changing idioms, alliances and rationales, even across settings that share very little on the surface. Robert Wistrich, tracing antisemitism at historical scale, emphasizes this durability and mutability, specifically how the content shifts, the targets and the slogans update, but the underlying route stays open.

With that in view, a swastika on an Irish road stops looking like a strange escalation and starts looking like portability in practice: a traveling template finding a surface.

And this is why language matters. Labels shape what we can see, what we can say and what institutions can hear. They can clarify, blur and also become a gatekeeping mechanism. As Nachum Kaplan put it, “Antisemitism will remain the only form of bigotry that requires peer review, occupying a unique taxonomical category: real, but highly conditional.” In such a climate, terminology becomes both essential and unstable: essential because precision protects reality, unstable because the burden of proof and the rules of debate keep shifting.

Another problem is slippage: when one term is asked to carry every form of anti-Jewish hostility, it can lose explanatory force even as the burden of proof keeps rising. The Bondi Beach attack is a recent example. In the immediate aftermath, the online ecosystem filled with confusion, false identifications and rapid reframing through conspiratorial, antisemitic and anti-Israeli narratives.

Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler writes that a misleading headline becomes a clip, a clip becomes a meme and fragments get recirculated stripped of origin and accountability. In her piece for The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), she notes how “Zionist” often functions as a stand-in for “Jew,” allowing old tropes to travel through newer language and even evade moderation. The result is a familiar sequence: violence, then cognitive fog, then a new wave of hate that helps prime the next moment.

Disagreement here doesn’t undermine the argument. It’s one of the conditions the argument is trying to track. Even readers who disagree with this framing can recognize the warning: when one term is stretched to cover everything, it clarifies less while the burden of proof grows heavier precisely when clarity is most needed.

Why naming can become part of the trap

Categories are necessary, but they can also get weaponized as a detour. When the first question becomes “what do we call this,” attention shifts from the act and its effects to a debate about admissible language, intent and Jewish credibility. The issue isn’t precision, it’s sequence. Because in many cases, careful naming is exactly what enables accountability; however, when definitional debate functions as postponement rather than clarification, it does the work of delay and dismissal.

After incidents like this, public conversation often moves quickly into definitional sorting:

Is this antisemitism or antizionism?

Is it about Israel or about Jews?

Is it hate or politics?

Those questions carry real stakes, as institutions need categories to act, journalists need language to describe and lawyers need terms that can be adjudicated. Yet the sorting can also obscure what the symbol is doing. When a swastika enters public space, it assigns a role, turning Jews into an object inside someone else’s moral framework, presenting that role as self-evident. It seeks to recruit the passerby into recognition, asking less “do you agree?” than “you see it too, right?”

Seen this way, the antizionism-versus-antisemitism debate often fails to clarify what is happening in real time because it presumes a shared arena of good faith, where meaning remains open, evidence registers and persuasion is still the point. The swastika signals that this stage has already been bypassed. Meaning is usurped by verdict.

What follows is circulation. Anything placed in public space will travel; social usability determines how — whether it meets resistance or finds uptake. This depends on the moral permission and social reward available to those targeting Jews. Historically, inversion supplied that permission, laundering aggression through righteousness and allowing extermination-era symbolism to circulate as critique rather than hatred.

Inversion and the moral laundering of aggression

Deborah Lipstadt has spent years warning about Holocaust distortion and inversion dynamics that flip moral reality by recasting Jews as perpetrators. One familiar form is the Nazi analogy: a move that uses the most discrediting symbol in modern European history as a tool of supposed righteousness. Inversion transforms it from something that should be disqualifying to something that feels urgent and principled. It turns extermination-era symbolism into a posture of virtue. Simply put: it makes antisemitism feel good.

This helps explain the social stickiness of the phenomenon — the way it takes hold. Inversion offers emotional clarity and moral elevation while simultaneously degrading reality. In that atmosphere, “solidarity” functions as permission rather than restraint. Long before anyone articulates a doctrine, the reflex is already in place: Jews are assigned a role, and the assignment feels like common sense.

I often return to a line of inquiry Hannah Arendt helped open. She showed how ideology destroys judgment by replacing factual reality with internal consistency, and analyzed what happens when political systems function without truth. I wonder about what occurs one step earlier: what happens when judgment collapses at the level of social interpretation — before ideology hardens, before institutions act, before belief coheres?

The pivot that seals the frame

The mechanisms that give antisemitism its moral and social force also shape how it is received in public discourse. By the time a symbol or act reaches debate, attention often shifts from the act itself to the person raising the concern. Claims of antisemitism are not always addressed on their merits; instead, they are scrutinized, contested, or reframed in ways that protect the underlying template.

In some recurring patterns, the person who names antisemitism becomes the controversy — not through engagement with the substance of the claim, but through suspicion directed at the act of naming itself. David Hirsh’s “Livingstone Formulation” describes a familiar pattern in public debate: instead of engaging the substance of a concern, it is recast as bad faith, “weaponizing antisemitism” to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.

I want to suggest a small extension of Hirsh’s insight. At the core of the Livingstone Formulation is a mechanism, a pivot, that protects the template from scrutiny. It’s a shift of focus — away from symbols, structures, and effects and onto the alleged motives of the person raising the alarm. Thus, naming becomes suspect, and the warning sign becomes the problem.

The pattern becomes self-sealing.

The incident triggers a demand for definitional proof, drawing focus toward Jewish motive; this focus becomes the rationale for dismissal. Over time, speed is rewarded: the faster the countercharge, the safer the framework, and the more the incident spreads before people have time to register its meaning or question the burden it places on its target. Conversation stays focused on policing Jewish perception rather than on why a swastika has become a socially usable cue. Simply put, the debate turns the incident into a referendum on Jews, which is exactly how the template survives.

None of this implies that every claim of antisemitism is beyond challenge, or that evidentiary standards should be abandoned. The concern is structural: that the standards themselves shift depending on who is speaking and what is being named. When recognition becomes conditional on passing an ever-moving evidentiary test, the template gains room to travel while the target gets tasked with proving that the road is real.

The paint comes off. The map remains.

Louth County Council says the graffiti will be removed and Gardaí are investigating. That is important, as public space should not carry extermination symbols or dehumanizing tropes. Yet the deeper issue remains: what the episode reveals about what has become culturally usable and therefore socially doable.

So yes, labels matter, language matters and categories deserve seriousness and care. At the same time, the argument over naming often arrives after the meaning has already been assigned.

I would imagine the task is to recognize a traveling template early, while interpretation is still in motion, and then rebuild the guardrails that keep moral argument tethered to reality before symbols harden into verdicts.

Thank you for engaging with my work. If I missed a citation or made an error, please let me know. And if you cite or share my work, I’d be grateful if you credited me.

Sometimes, I go there.
To the apartment.

Usually in the minutes before sleep.

Palms pressed against the smooth, gloss-coated windowsill.
Yellow cabs blur.
Dutch Girl Cleaners
on the west side of the street.

The rattle of the air conditioner,
the elevator gate,
muffled conversation from the other room.

Dove soap, everywhere.

If I’m honest, it’s every day—
back to a lifetime that held a different girl
until she wasn’t mine anymore—
and then didn’t.

A frame loosening,
its picture a tired sun slipping
into the current.

This water’s edge.
These lingering pieces of sky.

This place,
and the time we spent labeling pictures.

Black and white photographs—
names, captions
that I dutifully recorded,
sure they’d hold the life inside.

Imagine setting a sail
only to forget the wind,
or trying to make shadows
without light.

I lean forward—
arms stretched across the centuries,
holding on to what is ours.

Your great-grandmother’s childhood
spanning two continents:
the villa in Nuremberg,
the New York City apartment.

The points of hers and yours,
desperate to connect,
to transmit their inexplicability.

            When you got here,
            I understood I had misunderstood: 
            the right stories were the wrong 
            ones.

When you put me where time slows into detail
and vanishes in hindsight,
I heard the message…
like the soft insistence of wind chimes:
nothing is endless.

            The loss
            is the ache
            is the code.

            And I am a scrawny coyote
            circling the outskirts of a town.

I collect scraps and strands—
Marienbad,
the village,
words from old relatives still alive.

Is this the road
leading to the lake house?

Places leave voids,
and you can feel their shape.
You can see how they fill—
like branches and barren sky
held in the corner
of a foggy window.

             In.
            This.
            Clean.
            Light.

But maybe you could hold my hand
inside a New York winter,
the way she held mine
as we crossed over to “Lex.”

Shiny-black mink brushing my cheek
through this majestic chaos.

Horns, steam grates, rushing bodies—
translation:
you are safe with me, here.

Before you turned ten,
you mentioned you were happy
to “live in this world.”

Too delighted for curiosity,
I didn’t ask:
did you mean this one,
or the one it came from?

And later, I wondered
if it was possible that you knew about the maps—
how the streets of foreign towns
unfold like dominoes in reverse.

Maybe no one needs
a formal introduction
to alleyways.

I’m not going to ask
about the ancestors, yet.

I don’t think mentioning
the people who run at night
—through our blood,
through our veins,
through our dreams,
again and again—
would be helpful
as you become a teenager.

It would be less strange
to ask about what you notice.

Like the woman with the bun—
the way she pauses
in doorways,
her eyes run deep like wells,
but there is no darkness
in her house.

(It’s not visible from the road.
Keep looking.)

If you make it to the city,
find the other lady.
And don’t be fooled:
Schubert plays
on the gramophone,
but those mountains
never left her gaze.

            The loss
            is the ache
            is the code.

            And I am a scrawny coyote
            circling the outskirts of a town.

You and I talk a lot
about the rain.

Sometimes, it comes
in the afternoon.
The darkening of the street.
The way everything slows—
cars, voices, light itself.
That’s when I feel it—
the pull—
backward and through.

I want you to know:
this is not a lost room
you cannot enter.

I will not let this world die in my arms.

This is a piece from a longer work in progress. It comes from thinking about memory, inheritance and how we decide what to carry forward and what to hold for those who come after us.

On the desk sat my five-year-old self in a picture frame.

“She says to hold to my truth,” I explained to my mother. “Look at her quiet resolve.”

My mother wrinkled her nose.

So I went on to mention how, the other night at dinner, I spent ten minutes in a bathroom stall crying because the veining in a marble tile resolved itself into my dead father’s face—his outline unmistakable, even down to his glasses.

“You’re schizophrenic,” she concluded.

Pattern recognition is not always rewarded. Meaning-making is easily confused with delusion, especially when it is unguarded and emotionally precise. The speed with which care, perception and interiority slide into diagnosis has long been part of our shared language.

This was our dance—circling recognition without ever arriving, like a kite almost lifting to the wind.

But the next morning, my mother told me a story.

She had driven past a pond and noticed a woman feeding Canadian geese. Her first thought arrived quickly and without mercy: Why is this woman feeding these disgusting geese? The birds were a nuisance and by extension, so was the woman tending to them.

Then something unusual happened. My mother told me how she noticed the thought, how reflexively her mind reached for contempt, but how she stayed with it long enough to revise it. This woman is standing in the cold doing something kind.

My shoulders dropped.

Because I often find myself under the same gaze as the woman feeding the geese—the one whose care is mistaken for excess, whose intensity is perceived as imbalance, whose speech irritates as it rejects the emotional economy of the room.

“Why do you have to be narcissistic and make it about you?” she asked.

This time, I smiled at the old rhythm asserting itself—my interiority redirected toward self-absorption, my meanings reduced to pathology.

“You’re right,” I told her. “It’s not about me. It’s about you.”

I had come to believe the air between us was too heavy to hold even a faint flicker, that the weight of being misrecognized was no longer bearable. But this was the moment the kite caught the wind.

You will be called by your name.
You will be seated in your place.
You will be given what is yours.
The dream goes something like that.

The closing lines draw from Harvey Shapiro’s poem “On Some Words of Ben Azzai” (1963), encountered through Norman Finkelstein’s Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination.

The cafeteria smelled of sugar and cumin, of starch and glue from handmade flags. Parents had turned folding tables into small nations, each a diorama of memory. Samosas under strings of lights, pierogi steaming beside printed maps. Children in sequined shirts circled the room with paper passports while teachers stamped them like friendly border guards.

The evening was joyful, and for a moment, I almost felt hopeful about election day.

Still, there is a quiet dread in being the representative of the pariah state at your child’s school. It lives in the anticipation of the unfinished sentence that hovers between curiosity and accusation: what about the… you know… genoci— As if I’m meant to finish it, to collaborate in diminishment… libel. I won’t.

No one said the word, but I sensed it hovering at the edge of conversation. Some approached my booth cautiously, careful not to meet my eyes. They studied the lower half of my display: Israel’s history of innovation, Tel Aviv’s gay pride parade, the Arab Supreme Court judge who sentenced a Jewish prime minister to jail. Their gaze drifted downward, tracing the map from the Kingdom of Judea through the Islamic conquest, Christianity, the Ottomans, eyes cast down because this history feels a slope too steep to climb.

“Did you know Israel invented voicemail?” I asked, my voice too chirpy. Heads lifted, polite laughter fluttered.

“Isn’t that annoying? I mean, who likes voicemail?”

“They also invented the Intel chip,” I added. “And whatever makes your smartphone smart.”

South Korea’s booth gleamed with precision, and Barbados overflowed with plantains and rum cake. Palestine’s tables were draped in keffiyehs, the black-and-white lattice older than the flag itself, Iraqi by birth, a fisherman’s net repurposed into a loaded symbol: Juden sind hier unerwünscht.

I had known Palestine would be there, which is why I invited the Palestinian mother for coffee a few weeks earlier. Secular, born in Palestine and raised abroad, her English was perfectly American, her laugh unforced. We spoke the language of suburban mothers—home renovations, school politics, handbags. She mentioned that when they lived in Atlanta, they spent Christmas with Israeli neighbors; I told her we could do the same here, that the Hunan Lion was the place.

When I shared my understanding of Zionism—that I was pro and pro, because without a happy, healthy neighbor Jews can never be safe—she set her spoon down and looked toward the door. For a moment I thought she might bolt. Then she met my eyes.

“I’ve never heard it explained that way,” she said. “That makes sense.”

We liked each other, though she was cautious, and I felt responsible for that caution. When I suggested we share a booth—your flag and mine, opposite ends of one table—she smiled, gracious but unyielding.

“I think we’ll do our own.”

I said I understood, and I did. I didn’t want the counterfeit unity any school loves to photograph, the curated harmony of difference, the annual proof that we are one community and “love always wins.” Still, wouldn’t it have been something, here in Columbus, Ohio, to stand together for an hour?

In another time, I might have been Germany. I speak German without an accent, eat with the fork in my left hand and knife in my right, wear house shoes, lüfte the rooms. I’ve traveled to Israel several times, but my Hebrew is fractured. My Israel lives mostly in books—in Oz and Amichai, in Under the Domim Tree, children of survivors dreaming of Europe while building a future in dust and sunlight.

I could never wrap myself in the German flag that way. The Israeli one felt less like cloth than covenant—azure blue, crisp white, royal fabric from David’s kingdom, his descendants, his daughter beneath fluorescent light in the school cafeteria. Hineni.

I had to be Israel that night, even as my chest tightened; pride and fear folding into a single current. Both stories moving inside like weather systems—the part that learned to disappear and the part that insists on standing in full view. The body knew before the mind did that this was the work, to stay in charged stillness long enough for the two selves to share breath. The disciplined one who straightens her utensils and the one who stands wrapped in a flag beneath fluorescent lights.

As the evening waned, I wandered the aisles collecting the remnants of other people’s origins: a child’s paper crown, a smudge of turmeric, the faint echo of drumming. Someone took a group photo, and I smiled too brightly.

When the lights dimmed, I folded the flag carefully, as if it were a living thing, and carried it to my car. At home, I spread it across the foot of the bed. Under the lamplight, the blue stripes shimmered faintly, neither solemn nor triumphant, merely awake. I lay beside it, exhausted by diplomacy. The fatigue wasn’t physical but the ache of containment, of translating existence into something safe for others to absorb. To be the right kind of Jew is to anticipate the gaze before it lands.

“It’s nice to see Israel and Palestine talking,” Lebanon said as we packed up.

Of course they noticed. If I hadn’t known they would notice, I wouldn’t have sweated through my dress or practiced my smile. It shouldn’t have to be that way. China didn’t have to play defense.

And yet, after the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, the expectation lingers that we perform our humanity and make ourselves safe to sit beside, if we wish to attend.

The next morning, the cafeteria would smell of disinfectant and chocolate milk. Children would line up for lunch, paper flags crushed in the trash. But that night, as sleep blurred the edges of thought, I could still feel the flag’s weight across my shoulders—light, royal and unbearably alive.

“Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever…”
— St. Augustine, quoted in Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine.

My mother sat across from me at the restaurant.

I had just come from a meeting about ICE and the police and thought she’d want to know what happened. (After all, she’s the one who went downtown to the No Kings protest with my brother. I told them to go to Grandview because it would be safer; she told me I was “dogmatic.”)

In the absence of a question, I explained that sometimes my eye twitches, and I think it happens when I’m fatigued.

“Mine does too,” she said, as her eyes caught the light.

Like fine nets, papery creases lifted her face into a smile, and I was rapt—suspended in recognition.

If my body were a lake, this is how it would feel when a stone skipped perfectly across my glassy surface.
A shimmer?
Twilight.

It was like the time I noticed a woman waiting to board a plane reading Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.

“Your left eye?” I asked.
“No, my right.”

My throat felt dry, and I took a sip of water.

Weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Bernstein stood before the Brandenburg Gate and lifted his baton.

He conducted Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, changing one word—Freude (“joy”) to Freiheit (“freedom”)—and music turned into witness.

I was eleven in 1989, when the wall came down, and that night at dinner, the television stayed on.

Tom Brokaw’s watery eyes and cars streaming through the breach—their westbound headlights casting beams across the gray Berlin sky, as if holding back the dark.

But that night already belonged to the light.
Millions exhaling decades of division.

Thirty-six years later, across continents and time zones, we watch Instagram Live from Hostage Square in Tel Aviv.

Light flickers from phone screens, and faces glow in the darkness.

Hope swells in the soul of our nation.
This night may be only a flicker, but it too belongs to the light.