"Hope for the Best,Thirst for the Worst"

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

i also condemn Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.

it's very unfortunate that Israel has confused antisemitism with criticism of state actions. now when we hear antisemitism we don't know what it's referring to. what a disservice to efforts to combat antisemitism.

there is no world where criticizing a genocide, and wanting peace and freedom for all, could be antisemitic. everything I read about Judaism is life-affirming and just. wanting children to get to grow up could never be antisemitic. desiring that the geneva conventions be respected is not antisemitic. wanting an end to checkpoints and restriction of movement for Palestinians is not antisemitic. wanting children to stop being sniped is not antisemitic. wanting everyone to have equality under the law not antisemitic. it's not antisemitic to desire women and children and civilians to have medicine, food, and water.

proceeds to engage in a whole lot of antisemitism and disinformation

Hello people already tired of US American Project 2025 bullshit. Today's is Russell Vought/the OMB Office putting forth a proposal that all federal science grants have to be reviewed for "woke."

I'm not kidding. The proposal includes the word "woke" in quotes. It also includes some Trumpian ranting about DEI and gender ideology.

The basic idea being, following vague and basically undefined guidelines (whatever they decide woke means that day), the OMB office of Federal Financial Management will review applications for research grants and the like and reject or approve them based on "woke."

Being Russell Vought-run, this would likely mean anything they decide has to do with climate change, women, gay stuff, trans stuff, and possibly anything that might even remotely be about sex positivity or reproductive rights.

Comment period is open until July 14th.

Here is the proposed regulation. It's a doozy.

On this page, you will see a link to regulations.gov which is where you actually leave a comment. In the search bar right at the start of this page, you enter OMB-2026-0034 and it will take you to the place to comment on this bullshit.

I am hoping someone smart will start posting sample comments for us all. I did a ranty comment already but I wouldn't recommend that. I will do a proper one later. (Yeah, you can comment again. You can also comment anonymously.)

Some things to bring up: the guidelines are (probably deliberately) vague and undefined. This is going to drastically inhibit and hamstring valuable research. This is going to damage the US' reputation (even more). This is going to damage our status as an international power. (I mean, if you are looking for an argument to use against these people. We deserve to lose that but this is to save the science and the research, so.... Project 2025 wants Americans uneducated, isolated, and dumb but paradoxically also still wants to be the number one superpower. I know. P2025 people are real stupid.) This will cost the US money in possible future innovations, as the best and the brightest will go elsewhere and take their cutting edge tech and knowledge with them. (As they should honestly, but again, we are trying to defend the scientists here now who need their grant money.) Talking about money usually helps when arguing with these losers.

Just constant cuts to the future with Frodo chiming in as Bilbo tells the story to be like “that’s not how you told it when I was little!” and “wait, you never mentioned these orcs chasing you!”

And Bilbo hems and haws like “well, I didn’t want to scare the children” etc and we see the same scene get replayed multiple times with slight variations as Frodo and Bilbo bicker about the details of what actually happened

A Jewish woman walked into a bathhouse in Barcelona and was turned away because she wore a Magen David.

Before she could even enter, she was made to answer for the State of Israel. Before she could participate in ordinary public life, she was required to disclaim an imputed political association. Before she could be treated as any other customer, she had to pass a political purity test.

This is antizionism.

The question is no longer whether Zionism and Judaism are conceptually identical. The question is what antizionism produces on the ground: the exclusion, stigmatization, and discrimination of Jews as Jews. In this case, the establishment claimed it was barring “Zionists,” not Jews. 

Yet the mechanism of enforcement revealed the truth: a Jewish woman was identified as guilty by a Jewish symbol. The Star of David itself was treated as evidence of collective culpability.

That is the decisive nexus.

When a visible emblem of Jewish identity becomes presumptive proof of political sin, the claim “We oppose Zionism, not Jews” is exposed for what it becomes in practice. 

Discrimination law and moral reasoning both refuse to accept self-serving labels at face value. They examine conduct, context, protected characteristics, and disparate effects. Here, the effect is unmistakable: a private business denied service to a Jew because her Jewish symbol was read as Israeli affiliation.

Antizionism does not shed its character as anti-Jewish discrimination simply by clothing itself in the language of human rights or anti-colonialism. When Jews alone are expected to answer for a foreign country’s actions before they may access businesses, social spaces, campuses, or public life, a historic pattern reasserts itself. The demand is not placed on any other diaspora group. The test is not applied universally. It falls on Jews, and only Jews.

A Jewish woman was excluded from a public accommodation because a Jewish symbol was treated as proof of guilt.

There is a word for that.

@SarahEttedgui

generally, hold 30 to 60 seconds

🦒 stuck standing?

spread legs a comfortable distance apart and clasp hands behind back, then slowly bend forward (arms are free to move with shoulders going forward; our focus is on hips)

similar leg spread but hands pressed together in front, then squat down as far as comfortable

🌉 free to use floor?

from belly, place hands under shoulders then slowly push your torso up while keeping hips planted on ground; adjust as needed to feel stretch in hips and remember to not strain the spine/neck

from back with knees bent, engage your butt muscles to assist lifting hips up until there is a "ramp" from knees to shoulders (held bridge pose helps stretch muscles while repeating bridge pose helps build muscles. probably)

from back with knees to chest, clasp hands around the middle of one thigh and let legs fall back til arms are comfortably straight, then bring the other leg up to fold so ankle crosses over held thigh (makes a 4-like shape, where top of number is hips and pointed leg is the side of the hip you'll feel The Stretch in). repeat for other side!

🦋 butterfly seating?