I am continuing to advocate for you as I can. You may not be able to see these right now, but these are links to share for tear gas, eye injuries, stopping serious wounds from bleeding. I'll write/copy important info below.

Stopping blood loss (paraphrased from stop the bleed video):

Expose wound to see where bleeding is coming from

Use a t-shirt, cloth, or gauze to cover the wound

Use TWO HANDS, one pressed over the other, and apply DIRECT PRESSURE to the wound

Use your body weight if you need to!

If the wound is large, you can pack the wound with your cloth/gauze, then apply direct pressure as stated above.

What to do if your eye is injured by a rubber bullet or other projectile:

Don’t touch your eye.

Don’t rub your eye.

Stay upright and keep your head up.

Place a hard shield around your eye. Holding or taping a temporary eye shield, such as a paper cup or Styrofoam cup, may work in an emergency.

Do not let the shield touch the surface of the eye.

If the eye ruptures or breaks open, the eye’s contents must be saved. Keep the shield on your eye and get to an emergency room or call your ophthalmologist immediately.

If you are exposed to tear gas, take the following steps right away:

Get away from the tear-gassed area as quickly and safely as possible.

Flush your eyes with lots of clean water or eyewash (available at most pharmacies).

Remove any clothing near your face.

Seek fresh air.

Seek higher ground (tear gas is heavier than air).

Blink frequently to promote tearing.

Do not rub your eyes (rubbing might spread crystals of the chemical on the eye’s surface).

Remove your contact lenses.

Get medical help right away.

If you are exposed to pepper spray:

Don’t touch the eye area. Pepper spray is oil-based, so touching the area will spread the oil.

Blink frequently to help flush your eyes.

Flush your eyes with lots of clean water or eyewash (available at most pharmacies). Contrary to what you may have heard, milk is not recommended for flushing the eyes because it’s not sterile. A small study compared five treatments (Maalox, 2% lidocaine gel, baby shampoo, milk, water) and found no difference in pain relief.

A platform flagged a comment today as “Potential Harassment” and I am still laughing at the word potential. The comment was “go home murderer.” Directed at a Hebrew language teacher. Because I am Jewish and I exist online.

My husband removes these every single day without me asking. This is just our life. And I want everyone reading this Jewish and non Jewish to really think about who sends something like this. What that emptiness looks like. What drives a person to spend their morning hunting down a Hebrew teacher on Reddit to say this.

I feel sorry for them. And then I teach Hebrew anyway. Every single day. Because showing up is the resistance and I have no intention of stopping.

I wrote about what this life really looks like from the inside. It is the most personal thing I have published and my husband’s voice in it will stay with you.

I really understand where you're coming from, and it really shouldn't be like this. When flags of terrorist groups and regimes that kill queer people are flown alongside pride flags, something has gone terribly, badly wrong. And the only thing these bizarrely disparate groups have in common is violent hatred of Jews and accepting Nazi esque propaganda as gospel truth. I don't frequent leftist or queer spaces at all anymore, because I cannot pretend I don't see the hypocrisy.

Fellow queer people, Queers For Palestine does not care about you. They are distorting & expropriating your history to launder the violence of far right theocrats & child-killers in your name. They are selling you out.

Go ahead—tell the families of those 36,000 dead to “not be sad.” Tell the people who were blinded to suddenly “see the light of truth.” Tell everyone to stay home and shut up because the Islamic Republic claims it supports Gaza.

You have absolutely no idea what this regime has done. No understanding of the destruction it has brought to Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine.

I recently interviewed actor and talk show host Jerry O’Connell via Zoom. He spoke to me from Mort’s, a deli in the San Fernando Valley – the perfect setting for a conversation about the Jewish people.

O’Connell’s career took off early, with his breakout role as Vern in the classic film Stand by Me. There’s been a kind of elasticity to his career – an ability to adapt, to stay relevant, to keep showing up in new ways.

Over the decades, he’s moved easily between film and television, drama and comedy, with memorable roles in Jerry Maguire, Scream 2, and the family film Kangaroo Jack before reinventing himself as a television host and personality on The Talk for CBS.

I knew Jerry had a reputation as a consummate professional and a great guy. My husband, Jeff Melman, directed him and his co-star, Jim Belushi, in an episode of The Defenders, a series about two attorneys in “anything goes” Las Vegas. It was a terrific concept for two comedic talents that never made it to a second season, but that’s show business.

I didn’t know that he was willing to be a vocal ally for Israel and the worldwide Jewish community at a time when so many have fallen silent. A video clip from a recent Anti-Defamation League (ADL) event, where he said “Jewish people have been showing up for me and my family for my entire life, and [it’s] time for me to show up for my Jewish friends,” taught me otherwise.

His connection to Israel comes from his very good high school friend, Tommy Gutman, and his Israeli mother.

Apparently, Tommy’s mom had a full refrigerator and an easy nature. She would combine English words with Hebrew syntax, like “close the light” instead of “turn off the light,” which the teenagers found hysterical. “My God, she was so kind to us and just so funny. I loved her.”

Mostly, however, it is three wise men who are the key Jewish influences in his life. There is the late director Rob Reiner, who gave him his big break by casting him in Stand by Me and encouraging him to be himself; his longtime manager, Michael Rotenberg, who has guided his career; and his godfather, “Uncle Bill” Silverstein, a World War II veteran.

Uncle Bill’s stories about being a former POW made a huge impact on him, Jerry explains.

“[Bill] served in the [US] Air Force and got shot down. He would tell my younger brother and me stories about being a prisoner of war in Germany. The most frightening part for him was being discovered as a Jew.

“I couldn’t believe he had to live with that kind of terror. As a child, I promised myself, ‘if I ever see antisemitism like that again, I’m gonna do something about it. I’m gonna enlist; I’m gonna fight.’”

I was nine years old when I learned about the Holocaust, and it was as if my DNA changed. For years, like Jerry, I would have fantasies about how I would have rescued others had I been alive at that time.

A screening at the Simon Wiesenthal Center of the Israeli documentary October 7: Bearing Witness to the Massacre, an IDF compilation of raw footage from the attack, reminded him of his childhood promise.

“My mentor in Hollywood [manager] Michael Rotenberg, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, asked me to go with him. I said no; I didn’t want to see it. I couldn’t handle it. But he didn’t want to go alone, so I went [with] him.

“And after seeing that film, I thought I am witnessing a Holocaust; antisemitism on a global level again.

“And I have to tell you... It brought everything back. That childhood feeling. That anger. That promise: if something like this ever happens again, I’m going to do something.”

For O'Connell, doing something means showing up however he can. “Doing interviews, speaking, and signing letters. I know people in Hollywood have different opinions, but I don’t want to be combative. I just show up for my Jewish friends. If I didn’t, I’d feel ashamed when I saw them.”

He gets hundreds of messages of gratitude on social media, but also biting personal attacks, which he ignores. “No one says it to my face. I ignore it. I don’t think being combative helps. I focus on what I can control: my actions.”

I support his decision not to engage with the vitriol. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect members of the entertainment industry to be experts on all things Israel and do battle.

Social media is a cesspool of slander against the Jewish homeland. Like the Whack-a-Mole game at an arcade, when you bat down one lie, another one pops up. The mitzvah, especially for people whose jobs depend on being liked, is standing strong in your convictions.

I ask what drew him to acting in the first place.

He describes himself as the kind of child who was always in trouble for speaking out of turn, blurting things out, and playing the class clown.

“I got on a movie set, Stand by Me, when I was 11,” he says, “and I came to quickly realize that that behavior was not only allowed, it was encouraged.”

So, an acting career wasn’t a grand plan or a carefully nurtured path by a stage mother. It was a light-bulb moment when who he already was suddenly made sense in a new environment. “I was just good at it. I wasn’t really good at anything up until that point in my life.”

Jerry has an appealing, self-deprecating sense of humor and the ability to wink at the audience and include them in his mischief. Hollywood is always looking for pretty people. Pretty people who can really act are gold. Pretty, funny people who can act are platinum.

Comedy is a lot harder to play than drama. It requires timing, a sense of rhythm, and an understanding of misdirection that most people don’t have. How does he come by these traits?

“Hanging out with funny people makes you funnier,” he tells me. “I surround myself with people who make me laugh. I get coffee every morning with Howie Mandel (actor and TV host, St. Elsewhere, America’s Got Talent) and comedy writer Mark Blutman (Boy Meets World). We don’t sit there and talk about current events; we sit around and continually joke about them. The goal is not to see who can make the best point or win a debate. The goal is to make the table laugh.”

O’Connell went from the butt of the joke in Stand by Me to a hunky teen at 15 in the comedy series My Secret Identity. It’s about a teenager who gets malfunctioning superpowers. For example, he can float like a balloon but not fly, so he propels himself forward with aerosol cans.

“It was a very small, sort of lower-budget television show here in the United States,” he explains. “It was syndicated, so it was on individual stations around the country. It was not a network show. It was not a hit show.

“We’ve never been to Israel, okay? And that’s going to change at some point, but it must have been a hit in Israel, because there was a couple of years there where I could not walk down the street without an Israeli tourist or an Israeli person stopping me and saying, “You were in My Secret Identity!”

A few years later, there was another series, Sliders, on Fox, where Jerry plays the leader of fellow travelers moving between parallel worlds.

“I’m never recognized for it by anyone, unless you are Israeli. And then I get recognized for it all the time. It’s the craziest thing.”

It’s been a mystery, and he’d love to have it solved. A bit abashed, he says he hopes to get comments on this interview from Israelis to know whether it was a hit there. “I’m dying to know this.” So, if you’re an Israeli fan of either show, this is your chance to let him know.

For the last 18 years, Jerry has been married to actress and model Rebecca Romijn, who blasted into American consciousness with her Sports Illustrated “Swimsuit Issue” in 1999.

As an actress, Rebecca is probably best known for her roles as Mystique, a powerful, blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, shapely, and shape-shifting mutant in the first three X-Men films, and Commander Una Chin-Riley, Captain Pike’s Number One, in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

They live in Calabasas, a popular enclave for members of the entertainment industry.

During our conversation, Jerry plugs his favorite valley hangouts. Mort’s Deli in Tarzana “has great food,” he tells me, and “there’s a coffee place called Calabasas Coffee House. On Fridays, they sell the best challah bread.”

What has it been like raising their beautiful twin daughters, Charlie and Dolly, in Hollywood?

“They’re good kids – I think I’ll keep them.” He confesses to being a very vocal parent on the sidelines of their high school volleyball games. “I cheer them on. No negativity, just encouragement. But the challenge,” he says, “is raising kids with privilege. We want them to still have drive and appreciate humanity.”

They are allowed on social media, where so much of the Jew-hatred lives. “You can’t shield them – they need to learn to navigate it and defend themselves.”

However, Rebecca and Jerry have made sure the girls have learned about the Holocaust. “We’re fortunate to live in Los Angeles – we have the Wiesenthal Center. I took them there when they were very young. Their school has taken them there a couple of times.”

Living in Los Angeles, the family is surrounded by the Jewish community – friends, temples, Seders – so their children are aware of the history.

Unsurprisingly, given all his Jewish friends, O’Connell has experienced many Passovers, “even one with a mariachi band doing the Four Questions,” and brings his whole family. Mariachis are a new one for me, but then again, this is Hollywood.

The inclusivity warms his heart. “My family feels completely welcomed. Sometimes even more special because we’re guests. And I love brisket. But I worry about people who aren’t exposed like we are,” he says. “That’s where ignorance comes in.”

I ask whether he has adopted any Jewish traditions or values. Getting his teenage girls to sit down for dinner as a family is almost impossible, he tells me. “I envy my Jewish friends who have everyone together every Friday night. I wish I had that structure. We don’t celebrate Shabbat formally, but we do eat challah every weekend.”

His daughters are applying to college now, and there are colleges he wouldn’t feel comfortable sending them to, based on how the schools have responded since October 7. He is shocked at how some educational institutions have handled things.

I’m not. The universities began purging Jews in Germany in the 1930s, about a decade before the Nazis documented the state-sponsored genocide of the Jewish people in “The Final Solution.” Beginning in 1933, legislation mandated the dismissal of Jewish faculty and choked student enrollment, culminating in their complete exclusion from higher education by 1938.

Not many people – Jews included – outside of Israel are aware of how complicit German universities were in the Holocaust.

Holocaust education often centers on the atrocities committed within the concentration camps, but I think it should place equal emphasis on the broader conditions within German society that made those crimes possible. Examining how institutions demonized Jews and normalized exclusion and discrimination before the camps were established shines a light on the troubling parallels today.

O’Connell is understandably proud of New York University, where he majored in film and studied screenwriting from 1991 to 1994, because of the changes it made in the way it handles antisemitism on campus.

Settling a federal lawsuit, NYU updated its nondiscrimination policies to explicitly identify anti-Zionism as a form of harassment and established the Center for the Study of Antisemitism. In addition, the university implemented mandatory training for students, appointed a Title VI coordinator, and made it clear that using “Zionist” as a slur is a violation of its harassment policies.

He’s surprised at how much his outspokenness has meant to the Jewish community.

The accelerating Jew-hatred is affecting Israeli Jews the most. They have been verbally abused and literally hunted when traveling abroad, but Jews everywhere have lost their sense of safety and often feel abandoned.

Several Jewish members of the entertainment industry called for support in the weeks following October 7, 2023.

Actress and comedian Amy Schumer posted the following message on her Facebook page: “To my non-Jewish friends, call your Jewish friends. They are scared, they’re hurting, and they are terrified by your silence.”

Actress Julianna Margulies expressed all our pain when she wrote in a USA Today opinion piece, “My non-Jewish friends, your silence on antisemitism is loud. We are hurting, and we are terrified because history has shown us that this won’t end well for the Jewish people if you don’t hear our cries for help.”

“I really want to thank every person who has come up to me and said, ‘Thank you so much for that ADL speech,’” Jerry tells me. “It really means a lot to me because I didn’t realize the importance of what I was doing at that moment.

“I had a very emotional moment recently at LAX – that’s our airport here in LA,” he continues.

“I was sitting with my daughter. We were going to a volleyball tournament, and we were waiting to board our flight. A couple of teenagers, a girl and a guy, came up to me and asked to take a selfie. And listen, a lot of people recognize me. Sometimes, younger people know me from a kid’s movie I did called Kangaroo Jack. So I said, ‘Oh yeah, sure, I’ll take a selfie.’ If people ask for a photo, I take it.

“I said, okay, thanks, and I was gonna sit down with my daughter when the girl said to me, ‘Thank you for your ADL speech. It really meant a lot.’ And I found it to be very, very emotional. I can’t even tell you why.”

Before we wrap up the interview, he adds, “By the way, I have got to go to Israel. It’s crazy [that I haven’t been there].”

It's nearly 3am, I'm cold, Exhausted, and couldn't pay for the hotel because of incidentals deposit. So now $50 short, I had to leave. I'm now in a worse area. Please help me get somewhere, please. Please.

Venmo: Kate-Havekost (8154 if they ask)

I guess this is where I'm spending the night. Alone, outside, in the could. I was generously given money for a sweater. I don't know where to buy one at 12:30am in Denver.

It's 9:30pm 10pm 10:40pm 11:11pm (properly terrified, and cold no sweater and it's chilly) and after a Zillow mugging I still need like $200 for a room tonight. I'll let you have almost any painting I have in storage if you Venmo $200, name, address and top 3 painting choices. I can get it out of storage and ship almost anything tomorrow.

Absolutely fucking disgusting.

She got detained for trying to breach a legal blockade, held for a day or two then sent back home. What a disgusting fucking insult to the memories of the people who were sent to the actual concentration camps. Fuck this woman.

Also fuck this lying idiot as well:

Lies through her teeth she got treated so bad in Israel she has to be put on a stretcher with a fucking neck brace, then a few hours later she's completely fucking fine. What a miracle 😑.

What's even more stupid is people are absolutely gonna believe this lying bitch and start crying about her "torture".

This shit is exactly why i refuse to believe anything out of these lying idiots mouths unless they provide evidence to back it up (like the very clear video of Ben gvir being his disgusting self, that happened I won't deny and he can go fuck himself).

"We were attacked by western Libyan forces in our camp," says Sara Suriano, one of them. "We were on guard waiting for the release of our comrades, and we saw black military vans arriving. They were all wearing masks."

He explains that, at that point, everyone gathered in the mosque. "There was chaos," he adds. "The mosque was eventually cleared with gas." He describes some women being "pushed, hit in the back, one grabbed by the neck, one dragged by the feet outside." The worst hit was "a young man from the organization" who was left "unconscious and is believed to have suffered a head injury after being punched."

Meanwhile, news is awaited from the other ten activists from the same expedition, including Domenico Centrone and Dina Alberizia, who were detained in recent days in eastern Libya. The consul general in Benghazi is awaiting instructions to visit them.

If Israel had done this, there'd be a Third Intifada the next day.

Let's be precise about what @queercodedangel got wrong.

What the IRD list actually was:

A private notebook, handed to one person at the IRD, listing individuals Orwell thought were unsuitable to write anti-stalinist propaganda - not people he wanted arrested, surveilled, fired, or harmed - and none of them were.

Orwell believed these specific people were Stalinist sympathizers who would undermine the work of countering Stalinism. You can legitimately think that was a bad call - it was certainly a morally complicated one for Orwell. It was not, however, the act of an imperialist snitch. It was the act of someone who hated authoritarian Stalinism enough to do something uncomfortable about it, while continuing to publicly criticize the British state.

The tension between those two things evaporates the moment you understand Orwell's position: Stalinism wasn't socialism. It was fascism with better branding, and it was destroying the socialist project from within.

History proved Orwell right.

Orwell:

Got shot through the throat while fighting fascists in Spain

Spent decades producing some of the most devastating critiques of British imperialism ever written, including Burmese Days, and Shooting an Elephant.

Called himself a Democratic Socialist his entire adult life and meant it.

Wrote that "every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism."

@queercodedangel is taking one late-life episode, stripping it of all context, and canceling one of the sharpest anti-totalitarian, anti-imperialist pens of the twentieth century - because he wouldn't excuse Stalin's crimes. That's apparently the price of admission to the 2026 left - being ignorant enough to deny that Stalin was a monster.

Calling that "snitching" tells you nothing about Orwell. It tells you that for some people, anti-Stalinism is a greater sin than imperialism ever was - and you can only take that position if you know nothing about what Stalinism was.

That sucking vacuum of ignorance where actual knowledge should be doesn't inspire a single second of hesitation before they confidently preach provable falsehoods. The less @queercodedangel knows about Orwell, the IRD list, or Stalin's crimes, the more confident the verdict. This is what happens when a generation decides memes and reels are sufficient substitutes for actually reading anything.

Orwell spent his life fighting this kind of epistemic laziness - the willingness to flatten complex realities into politically useful, emotionally resonant, self-affirming fictions.

This is why Gen Z desperately needs to read the Orwell and Huxley they've been told to avoid.

That's funny, I don't see you criticizing Russia the same way. I don't see you criticizing China the same way. Afghanistan. Syria. Yemen. Iraq. Iran. Turkmenistan. North Korea. The list goes on

That's interesting as I'm russian myself, dumbass, tell me more about how we, russians, are firebombed at protests, blocked from student campuses, called baby killers, vermin, how russian neighborhoods are filled with people screaming for our blood, how random russians are blocked from cafes and stopped in the streets and harassed over Putin's war simply because they're russian.

Ну давай. Расскажи мне, русскому человеку, о притеснениях русских иммигрантов. Может ещё заведешь мне путинскую шарманку, про то, как русскоязычных везде притесняют и обижают, а? Ну так, если совсем мозгов нет. А судя по тебе мозгов реально нет и вряд ли когда-то были

Where are all the articles about Orthodox Churches in financial crisis because they can't afford the security measures they need to not get killed for congregating?

This isn’t about Israel or Palestine, this is about Pride and celebrating that. Banning Jewish Pride flags is antisemitic. The Star of David is the symbol of the Jewish religion.

We feel unwelcome in our own community and no one seems to notice. Please share this so people can understand.

a) yes, they did.

b) cool, YOU never heard it, so it didn't happen?

c) okay cool, they more often use terms like, "Israel heavily lobbies Congress and thus influences Congressional decisions--"

So does China and over a dozen Arab Muslim countries, yet I don't see you accusing Chinese or Muslim Americans of "controlling Congress" on those grounds.

In fact, you accuse anyone who does of being "Sinophobic/Islamophobic."

Showing you're all two-faced hypocrites.

d) And again, that's beside the point:

The Left claims to protect minorities.

The Left harasses and attacks Jews.

The Left claims Jews "don't count as minorities" because "Israel donates to Congress, so Jews are REALLY the ones with power--"

Except

1) Diaspora Jews =/= Israelis

2) You cowards never attack ACTUAL Trump Congress Officials or Trump fans at Trump Rallies, because you know deep down they'll actually hit back and/or legally retaliate with the full force of the law.

Thereby demonstrating with your COWARDLY ACTIONS who you REALLY think is in power.

You're not "punching up at those in power" when you harass and attack Jews, you're BULLIES AND COWARDS who're PUNCHING DOWN AT AN EASY TARGET.

Mike Johnson tactics before a double-back to allude bribe taking SPECIFICALLY by "An Israel Owned PAC" (AIPAC is American) over any other PAC while insisting you're NOT talking about a Jewish conspiracy? "I don't know about that" AND THEN the double-back? Objectively less competent than Mike Johnson.

The US/Western left is a Nazi bar. All those cute stories about Punk Bars and Punching Nazis? well. They decided they liked what the Nazis had to say, and if they called Jews/Israelis Nazis and said things like "Even the Nazis weren't this depraved" it wouldn't be noticed or called out, or affect people because they don't see Jews as people. They don't see Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims or Druze or Syrians or really anybody as people either, just elves or avatars to engage their fandom-religion over because it lets them 'punch up' Wil Wheaton posted this and a bunch of people felt very good about themselves and then he and a whole bunch of other people failed Jews and let Nazis into the bar because the Nazis slightly changed how they said what they said, and what they wore.

The DSA, Fight Agency, Ivy league nepobaby shitheads funded and supported by Neville Singham, the CCP and Russia (to fuck with US function because they're autocratic imperialists with their own interests) are doing their best to make the Democratic Party into a Nazi Bar after spending decades making the academic/protest left their useful idiots and disposable weapons. And a whole lot of people who consume activism as a faith-fandom because they're certain they don't need a faith or a church social group and are recreating it through some fuckers recruting them through HERO STORIES and REVOLUTION STORIES are primed to let them. Because they like the Good Things and so they are the Good People. And Jews are easy for loser populists to blame.

Punch Nazis, right? Anyway.

I’m not going to stop feeling strongly about it in the same way I still feel strongly seeing centuries of my people’s history buried under Catholic churches. I understand the dome is there now, and I don’t think it should be destroyed because I understand the significance it holds now.

But I’m not going to stop being angry about it. Especially since my people are not even allowed to go there. I can’t imagine the rage we Mexicans would justifiably have if Spaniards suddenly decided we aren’t allowed to visit our own ancient cities and temples becuase the land is “their’s now” since they built their churches there. The patience and understanding of the Jewish people is so fucking undermined. We have time and time again been expected to and have bent over backwards for others becuase we fundamentally believe in uplifting everyone, even at the cost of ourselves. Even in our own fucking country. Even in the country everyone accuses of being “Jewish supremacist” do we still face blatant discrimination, and allow ourselves to face it for the sake of our muslim neighbors and muslim Israeli citizens.