... in a way that still advocated for Palestinian rights, freedom, and self-determination was a much more productive one. If you get stuck in this cycle of shame over your Israeliness you will never break out; short of suicide there's nothing you can do to "unIsraeli" yourself enough.

It's hard to believe they'd issue a statement saying "many in our community have serious concerns about Donald Trump, while many others have enthusiastically supported him." Jews are rightly skeptical of his "words of encouragement" and it's his responsibility to disabuse them of their skepticism.

Self hating Jew is not the right word, because the hate is directed outward toward a very particular historical/social category of Jews

Thanks so much for reading

Not unlike how when I insist on a principled distinction between boycotting settlement products and non-settlement products and then Bezalel Smotrich says it all belongs to Israel makes me feel like a chump

As stark a reminder as possible that something really fundamental has changed for Jews over the past few years (or maybe that's just my own neurosis!)

It's funny, I just re-watched Annie Hall in theaters last night and all the references to the world of NY Jewish intelligentsia fell completely flat (Dissentary, NY Review of Books, etc.) And the jokes about his paranoia that antisemites are everywhere felt completely different and rly uncomfortable

Some of us have been warning about this in good-faith for a while now, but were told to stop "tone policing" or were "enabling genocide" by trying to address it

But even worse, the guardrails that we put up against our own hearts being hardened, the moral lines we do our best not to cross *in spite of* our pain not being seen, is rarely reciprocated by this movement. It's extraordinarily painful.

And so time and time again it feels like our pain is not seen - it is mocked, dismissed as propaganda, and hand-waved away with demands for "context" or doing a "power analysis." >

Yet analogous concerns have been dismissed by Mamdani and (especially) his supporters in the name of Palestinian liberation. What are you endorsing by attending a rally that endorses violence against Israeli and "Zionist" civilians? >

(support for the hostages, strength in the face of antisemitism) for fear of what I might be co-signing by attending (eg, booing calls for a ceasefire or vague calls for Israel's right to defend itself that felt indefensible in the context of the destruction of Gaza). >