Am Yisrael Chai

The wise anon.

The wicked anon.

The simple anon.

Okay, sure, let's have it out. I imagine I'll pretty much piss off everyone with this.

First: the only confidence I have in my understanding of the political situation of the Middle East is that I have no fucking understanding whatsoever of the political situation in the Middle East. Sure, I've read plenty. I have friends of many many stripes. But I'm not a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, folks: I know enough to know how much I don't know, and how much I know is tons.

Second, you say that person is a "zionist." There are three things I find pretty annoying about this as a defense attorney. One is that the term is not defined, and the other is that there is a complete lack of evidence. The third is the implicit assumption that being a "zionist" is enough to wholeheartedly condemn anyone.

Let's tackle these one by one. And, once again, I am neither a scholar of Jewish history nor Middle Eastern history nor anything except American criminal law.

First: definition. There are many possible meanings of zionist that I see people use. One potential meaning of "zionist" seems to be "is Jewish, but fails to disavow Israel as fast and loud as I personally want them to." Sometimes the meaning of "zionist" is just "is Jewish." Sometimes it's "a Jewish person who wishes for a return to a very distant ancestral homeland." Sometimes it's "wholehearted supporter of Israel's war crimes." A lot of pointless arguing, it seems to me, is centered around someone saying they are zionist, i.e., they would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country, and another person hears that they are zionist, i.e. they enjoy wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Second: No evidence. Self-explanatory. You are an anon. I don't know why I'm supposed to trust your word. I read police reports for a living and I am supposed to be able to trust them, and let me tell you how many lies they contain.

Third: the assumption of condemnation. I literally defend the human rights of sex criminals in court. I defend murderers. What we are talking about, right now, at best, is a human person expressing an opinion, however potentially damaging and offensive (depending on definition of zionism and truth of accusation). Do you think I'm gonna say that Jewish people who express an opinion are inhuman and deserve segregation from the rest of us?

Do you think I'm ever going to stop reaching out my hand to people who use violence? Do you think I'm ever going to lose the hope that someday they will lose the fear that makes them resort to violence?

Finally, now that I've spent some time listing my problems with your case, so what.

Let's use an example closer to home. I'm an American, and I do in fact believe that America is a nation and will continue to be so, and that tearing down all government to give it back to indigenous people (something that is, to be clear, to my understanding, not comparable with any kind of political situation in Israel) is not possible as things stand. And yet nobody's here interrogating me about Donald Trump and his bombing of Iran or whether I support ICE's jackbooted thuggery.

A little further from home? If I met a Russian person, my first ask would not be "Tell me in detail your thoughts on Ukraine and Putin."

And in those two examples, I myself and this hypothetical Russian person are actually members of the country in question that is doing the thing. A Jewish person who is not Israeli isn't even that.

Listen. I think there's a lot to be unpacked about how the insularity of Jewish culture and the separateness of it from the countries where it lives is both in the interest of continuing the Jewish ethnicity and in the interest of the people who want Jewish people exterminated, and how the double-pull of those two interests maintain a tension that otherwise might dissipate. I think there's something real to be analyzed about how modern anti-semitism isn't a recurrence of medieval anti-semitism but a different thing, a sign of fascist thinking.

I think there is a horrific tragedy for everyone involved that the group who was decimated beyond belief in the blackest events in human history now has a very loud and visible nation channeling their survival into rage and violence.

I think that there are lots of Arab nations around Israel that would gladly see every person in it subject to that same rage and violence, and I'm not down with that shit either.

I think the history of who colonized who and when and what pogroms did what and how violence and why are all too fucking complicated to untangle.

I think the only way truly forward for Israel and Palestine is some kind of truth and reconciliation type thing and that Israel as it stands is too scared to see all their atrocities come to light.

I was raised atheist with college professor parents, so you can bet Jewish people in academia were part of my life from an early age. I don't understand antisemitism literally at all. It's completely incomprehensible to me. I also think Arab culture is gorgeous and studied Arabic in college. I don't discount the idea that I have subconscious biases; I've done my best to unpick them, but it's lifelong work.

The whole goddamn clusterfuck is a great example of why violence begets violence begets violence. I reject the idea that One Final Ass-Kicking on anyone's part will solve any one of these problems. The only thing that ends violence is not choosing violence. And that can't happen until enough people in and out of power want the violence to stop. There. Not here. There. It can't be imposed from outside. It has to come from within.

And that's a decision -- I must add -- that I seriously could not have less to do with. White Americans should not be making any of the related decisions.

Here endeth the essay, with one final note.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/magazine/goy-antisemitic-youth-slang.html

Last week I interviewed a teenager about his use of the word “goyslop.” That’s a term for cruddy, low-quality food — as coined, or at least popularized, by far-right antisemites. This teenager was absolutely not a far-right antisemite; he just happened to attend a New Jersey high school where students, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, said “goyslop” all the time. “If your friend goes and gets McDonald’s, and gets two burgers and a shake,” he explained, “like, ‘Oh, my god, that’s so goyslop, that’s goy.’”

If you enjoy Philip Roth, you might be interested to hear that this school sits not far from where Alexander Portnoy, of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” was chastised by his mother for eating hamburgers and other chazerai — junk — while his constipated father drank “not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia.” That’s one typical use of “goy,” or the plural “goyim”: to refer to those who aren’t Jewish. The Hebrew “goy” just means a people; Bibles routinely translate it as “nation.” But it also came, in Hebrew and Yiddish, to describe the peoples that Jews lived among — say, the ones Portnoy calls “goyim with golden hair and silver tongues,” the ones whose company will never actually promote his father, only treat him to the occasional weekend away in a “fancy goyischehotel.”

All of this is really normal. The world is full of names for “not us”: haole, gaijin, Englischer, allochtoon. They can be totally neutral, or deeply unkind, or just about anywhere in between. Many Jews would tell you “goy” is like, say, “foreigner” — neutral, but certainly capable of becoming an insult if the speaker wants it to.

The abnormal part, in this case, begins with the distressing number of people who imagine that the world is controlled by secretive Jewish cabals, and that the very existence of “goy” is airtight proof of their supremacist plot. For years now, antisemitic extremists have engaged in a trollish embrace of the word — creating, among other things, a neo-Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League and a fringe crowdfunding platform called GoyFundMe.

Some of these people felt vindicated by the release of documents concerning Jeffrey Epstein. Never mind the exploitation of children: Here in his inbox were wealthy Jewish men, writing one another sardonic emails about the goyim! The way Epstein used “goy” was often pretty similar to how gentiles might joke about WASPs, and his sourer uses just feel like a famously loathsome guy being loathsome, but still: Soon we had the far-right pundit Candace Owens treating this as proof of a bigotry fundamental to the faith. “This is, for them, a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over,” she told podcast listeners. That “cattle” idea traces back through literal Nazi propaganda to antisemitic sources like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; if Owens really believes it to be true, she differs from other Catholics in her understanding of Scripture, which would have God promising Abraham that “I will make of you a great cow.”

“Goyslop” has its roots in people who think this way starting to agree with Portnoy’s mother about the chazerai. But they imagine sinister Jewish elites purposefully feeding the masses cheap, enfeebling swill — a notion they express, for the most part, not on podcasts but in flippant internet postings about the pliant “goycattle” being herded to their troughs. And it’s that version of “goy” that ended up leaching into high school.

My source — 15, Jewish, a colleague’s son, resident of a racially and religiously diverse suburb — estimates that at least 70 percent of the students in his school would be familiar with “goyslop.” (Another student, who feels less firm on the exact meaning, puts the number at just under half.) He is fully aware that it arose via an “antisemitic thing about Jews trying to kind of poison the minds of the people through food and stuff.” But this is not, in his experience, remotely how it operates among his peers, who see it as criticizing, if anything, corporations. “It’s not really a thing like that anymore,” he says. “Like, everyone says it.”

This may be a wild journey for a word to take, but it’s not an unusual one. The internet is full of fringe jargon that breaks containment and seeps, mostly shorn of its original politics, into the way ordinary young people talk. How? One analogy might be the way that, in conversation, you can use a silly voice to playact as another type of speaker — say, pushing up your glasses and doing a “nerd” voice when correcting somebody. Online, people do this by parodying other posters’ vocabulary or typing habits — including, sometimes, the language the fringes are constantly bombarding everyone else with. It gets toyed with at an amused and dismissive arm’s length, then passes from arm’s length to arm’s length until it is miles from where it began, operating as a kind of 6-7ish in-joke that many young people will tell you is not nearly as deep or serious as whatever alarming origins you’re worried about.

directly related to what was happening here:

Are you a religious Christian for whom a Pride parade is considered "work" and therefore something you would not be able to attend were it scheduled on a Sunday? Do you attend Mass on Sunday that takes all day and therefore limits your free time on Sunday? No? So then why is it such a hassle for things to be scheduled on a Sunday? In fact, many workplaces still don't give off Saturday as a given, but they do give off Sunday. Wouldn't you want more people (Jewish or not) to be included?

Jews, whether you like it or not, were and are deeply foundational to the modern LGBTQ Pride and Rights movement. Magnus Hirschfeld was a Jew. Harvey Milk was a Jew. Brenda Howard, the literal "Mother of Pride" was a Jew. They may not have been Orthodox Jews or Shabbat-observant, but Jews of all levels of observance and religiosity deserve to be included. And Jewish religious institutions have been supportive of LGBTQ causes for decades. And even if Jews weren't part of and supporters of the community from the start, Jews are part of the community now and ought to be included, as should people of all ethnicities, races, religions, and nationalities.

But honestly? My views have changed since I made that post that earned it a screenshot and post onto reddit saying "look how crazy and entitled those Jews are". I think the Western LGBTQ movement's exclusion and hatred of Jews now goes far beyond scheduling things on Saturdays. That's just the surface level. Things are far more overt when Jewish interest groups are quite literally banned from Pride events, when Jews are regularly harassed and attacked both off-line and online, when the overwhelming message from the Western LGBTQ world is that an LGBTQ person who is also a Jew is a traitor to their own kind. And it gets worse and worse each year as more LGBTQ people trade in their own safety and welfare and future prospects to spend their time, energy, and money hating Jews. Not only is it disgustingly hateful, it's counterproductive. LGBTQ rights are being attacked and stripped away all around the Western world, but people care more about investing their energy into best excluding Jews, Jews who, LGBTQ or not, would be and are supportive of LGBTQ causes. It's deeply insidious.

My schedule isn't more important than anyone else's. I know that. You know that, and you know that you were reading my post in bad faith. Jews are not the only people who would benefit from important Pride events not being scheduled on Saturdays. People who still have to work on Saturdays would benefit too. And I know you read a tiny snippet of my post and blacked out, because in that post I also mentioned Pride events being scheduled on Jewish holidays (Shavuot often times falls out in June). I think if you are in a community with a large number of Jews who are contributing members, it's only basic decency to be considerate. I am annoyed at conventions that do that same thing, mind you. But "niche interest conventions" are not a broad, umbrella movement the way the Western LGBTQ movement is. A science fiction convention isn't part of the same movement as a WWII history airshow, for example, and they are often not run by the same kinds of people and they are often not even attended by the same kinds of people.

A few years after the end of World War II, Yakov Handshtok, who had survived the war in the Soviet Union, returned to Ryki, a small town between Warsaw and Lublin. Almost all of the town's Jews, who until 1939 constituted most of its population, had been murdered in the extermination camps of Sobibór and Treblinka. In June 1945, four young Jews who returned to Ryki after being liberated from concentration camps were murdered by armed attackers.¹ Entering town, Handshtok was struck by the total absence of Jewish life. Everything looked familiar, yet dead, to him. Looking through the windows of former Jewish homes, he was startled to see Christian icons standing on the windowsills. Horrified by this emptiness, he wondered to himself, "Perhaps this isn't Ryki?" Arriving at Ryki's synagogue—and realizing it had been transformed into a granary— he leaned against the wall and wept: "My heart felt chilled... my throat was suddenly constricted."² Not far from Ryki, Moshe Rapaport was making his way back to Biłgoraj, another town that used to be predominantly Jewish.³ Wandering by the old Jewish cemetery, the study house, the mikveh, and the place where the synagogue once stood, he was filled with despair: "Everything was a void." The streets were paved with headstones that had been uprooted from the cemetery, the chiseled Hebrew inscriptions legible and clear to the eye. Everything seemed to him like a "vast graveyard.”⁴

Embroidered towel for the mikveh

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It is an antisemitic dog-whistle. It is saying that this is what Jews are: corrupt, money hungry, predators.

It is disgusting.

Ever heard of a Black Wedding held in a cemetery to ward off plagues? Or the Schulklopfer knocking on windows to wake the people for morning prayer?

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I am a lifelong Democrat and civil rights advocate. Both Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel years ago warned about being silent in the face of the rise of antisemitism and racism in America. King and Heschel, working in solidarity were effective and transformational to attain advances in civil rights and human rights for all.

History has taught us that when Black and Jewish Americans unite to confront hate, both communities emerge stronger and with a deeper understanding of each other’s history and perspectives.

Today, I am alarmed by the growing tolerance of antisemitism emerging within the political party that the overwhelming majority of Black and Jewish Americans call home. The ease with which some leaders excuse away this hatred should haunt all Black Americans. What starts with one minority quickly evolves into the hatred of others.

Many in my party are creating creative excuses for Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo. He got it a long time ago. He got it while fighting for America. He didn’t know what it was. Would the same parade of voices coming to Platner’s defense be doing so if he had a KKK tattoo? What’s the difference?

Black America continues to respond and to challenge the resurgence of racism and hate across the nation. We also cannot afford to be silent today about the evil surge of the virus of antisemitism and the increase in hate-filled violence against Jews and Blacks throughout the country.

As a Black American, I know what it looks like when a political party decides one community’s safety is negotiable or ripe for triage. I know the rationalizations — the strategic hesitation, the “but the politics are complicated,” the quiet looking away. I have watched it continue to happen to Black America, even though many of us have been the most loyal and engaged supporters of the party. I will not watch it happen to others without saying it plainly and publicly.

Throughout this election season, candidates are being pummeled with questions about whether they take support from AIPAC – a pro-Israel advocacy organization. One is right to ask whether candidates are backed by one political action committee versus another. But this campaign is far more nefarious. Orchestrated online by a group known as Track AIPAC, this effort is not merely about whether the candidates take AIPAC PAC contributions, they are overtly targeting pro-Israel Americans who personally contribute to candidates. This is a dangerous slope to driving these Americans out of the political process.

Moreover, the focus of Track AIPAC is not merely AIPAC or AIPAC members. It also tracks donations from J Street members – a dovish organization more aligned with the far-left than with AIPAC. That should sound alarm bells as it exposes the effort is targeted at Jewish Americans. Effectively creating a list of who is a good Jew and who is a bad Jew.

If Black Americans await in silence to the tracking of Jews today in America, in the morning Black Americans and others will also be tracked and targeted with impunity.

Singling out American citizens and demonizing their political participation is counter to core Democratic values. Yet instead of calling it out, Track AIPAC is being tolerated — and celebrated — by some in our party. This is not transparency. It is a registry. We know where registries lead.

Black America has its own history with lists — with the government and private actors tracking who we were, who we gave money to, and what organizations we belonged to or allegedly affiliated. We called it what it was: racial profiling and intimidation.

History does not announce itself. It arrives through normalization — through the slow acceptance of things once considered unthinkable. The virus that entered our coalition did not arrive labeled as antisemitism. It arrived as anti-Zionism, then as anti-Israel sentiment, then as willingness to embrace those who celebrate terrorism against Jews, then as systematic targeting of Jewish donors, and now as the punishment of Jewish officials who dared enforce rules equally. Each step felt, to many well-intentioned people, like a defensible position.

That is how social viruses work and spread. Believe me, the lived experiences of Black Americans know this reality and the eventful fatal contradiction to the oneness of humanity.

The Democratic Party has spent decades insisting that the safety and dignity of minority communities are not negotiable. That “the enemy of my enemy” is not a moral framework. It is time to say it now — without the asterisks we seem to reserve uniquely for Jews.

If Jewish Americans, Black Americans and others are not protected from profiling, scapegoating, from registries, and from being driven out of their own party — with the same reflexive clarity we’d bring to protecting any other community — then our coalition is not what we say it is. And every underrepresented community must take note and act to end all forms of bigotry, hatred and discrimination.

Tonight I'm gonna give you all my love on the backseat 💚