The Good Life.

How to spring-load your bow!

So Muslims and Christians have a right to certain sites in Israel because they have deep religious significance, but Jews don’t? They have no right to their own damn indigenous land? To the birthplace of their entire culture, religion, language, and identity? The amount of mental gymnastics and Jew hatred required to make these statements is mind numbing.

And for anyone that’s curious, Muslims and Christians already can and have been to Jerusalem for decades. The whole “Jerusalem is for everyone” is so fucking stupid because literally anyone can visit already. And this argument is even more rich when considering the Temple Mount, the literal holiest site in Judaism, has highly restricted access to non-Muslims. Jews cannot visit their own holiest site without massive restrictions and they are not allowed to pray there. Only as recent as this year have SOME Jews been allowed to pray there (discreetly and out of sight). They’re facing these restrictions in their own indigenous land, no less! You would think since Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” country they’d get rid of these restrictions in their own fucking capital city.

Didn't think that I'd have to post this exact comparison again, didn't even think I'd have to post it once, and yet I stand disappointed again.

On the left: a sign in German on a street in Bavaria, reading: "Jews are unwanted here." Photo taken by an American in 1937.

On the right: a message from a hotel in Bavaria, Zum Hirschen, sent to Israelis who tried to book a stay, reading: "Sorry, there are no Jews allowed in our hotel." June 2026.

Again, the incident has been "handled": Booking.com took the hotel off its platform and the hotel itself was contacted by the Israeli consulate in Munich. The hotel at first denied sending the message, but later stated that it was indeed one of its employees that sent it. It is yet unclear if the case will lead to formal proceedings.

Let me point out that one small detail. They didn't said Israelis weren't allowed, they didn't say Zionists weren't allowed. They said Jews. Now Bavarians aren't new at the scene of antisemitism, in fact they are very experienced, but nowadays, we don't say Jews when we're being discriminatory, no, we say something else. You're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud! (For those in my comments who don't understand sarcasm, that was it.)

This joins many concerning cases across Europe and the UK (not to mention the US!) that reenact the nostalgic scenes of the 1930s and 1940s. (Again, sarcasm). I haven't yet made a post about the spa in Spain that refused a Jewish woman on entry on account of her Magen David necklace. And here Europe strikes again, in the very place the Nazi party rose to power. All those woke westerners that are so proud to chant about punching Nazis, and where are you now? Aren't you ashamed? Wouldn't even recognize one if it was saluting in your face.

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.

That they call all israelis colonizers.

You do not get to profit, financially or attention wise or another way, off of a *potentially* queer jew whilst we are banned from pride events.

We do not know if she was questioning her sexuality but ultimately straight or if she was actually queer because she was killed for the crime of existing as a jew before she could come out. Queer rights obviously matter. Anne Franke is not the person you should be using.

You need to protect alive queer jews. You need to love all jews, not just the dead ones.