Reminder of when the Ford Motor Company decided to sponsor a Rosh Hashanah advertisement, which is awkward, given the history of Henry Ford.

I hope all the guys sitting around eating hummus have a wonderful Rosh Hashanah.

I don't know; I don't really think it was terribly subtle.

I think part of the reason people have trouble accepting how openly fascistic the Trumpist movement is, is because they don't use the aesthetics of the 1930's Nuremberg rallies. Rather, it's a knowingly campy simulacrum of those aesthetics, which disarms criticism through the conscious irony of it.

"A bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus."

I don't think this is intended to go over well with those of us who are not Christian. I think it's intended to signify to us that we can at best be provisionally tolerated, but will never truly belong.

There are a lot of people on the burgeoning ethnonationalist right who combine admiration for the state of Israel with antisemitism against diaspora Jews, but Tucker Carlson is not one of them. He just hates Jews, whether in Israel or in diaspora.

But at least he didn't recognize the state of Palestine. That would truly be antisemitic.

“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Of course, even if it were only focused on Muslims, spreading the "great replacement" conspiracy would be wrong. But the fact that the Israeli right can fail to realize how dangerous this conspiracy theory is to diaspora Jews is a sign of how blinkered they've become by ethnonationalism.

It's notable that when AOC compared Trump's family separation facilities at the US southern border to concentration camps in 2019, the ADL criticized her for supposedly trivializing the Shoah. My guess is they will not speak up against this. Holocaust comparisons for me, not for thee.

Holocaust remembrance culture has gone badly off the rails.

Never has there been a Rosh Hashanah card that more screams, "This was printed in 1968."

In 1986, the Swedish band Abba put out a Rosh Hashanah card, which I find kind of funny, because never has there been a band that more screamed "Aryan" in their imagery.

When Jewish student groups broke with Hillel International over their guidelines for speakers on Israel-Palestine, and created the Open Hillel movement, why did they not just start a competing Jewish student organization and call it Shammai International?

I will never celebrate a murder, least of all of a young father. But I do not consent to deify a moderately popular podcaster who said Black women "do not have the brain processing power" of white men, who said "Jewish dollars" fund "cultural Marxism," into a great man of history. I dissent.

And it’s not only the right. Yair Golan, part of the opposition, just said the establishment of a Palestinian state would be “destructive” for Israel. With an opposition like this, who needs Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir?

Also, there's an obvious inconsistency between, "Palestinians having sovereignty is contingent upon Hamas not committing crimes" and "Israelis shouldn't be judged on the actions of their government." Are people responsible for their governments or not?

A Rosh Hashanah advertisement from 1959.

I know the consistency is not exactly the point here, but you can't simultaneously believe: 1. It's impossible to make peace with Hamas because they want all of Israel-Palestine, not a two-state solution. 2. Recognizing two states along 1967 lines, the PLO position, is a reward to Hamas.

The Israeli right would have you believe that recognizing a Palestinian state along 1967 lines is somehow “rewarding Hamas,” and also that the reason there can’t be a Palestinian state is that Hamas wants all the land of Israel-Palestine and won’t accept the 1967 lines.

This headline in the "Jerusalem Post" is somehow *not* meant as a criticism of Zionism.

Spending time with a bunch of liberal arts professors makes you realize how funny it is to imagine we could coordinate a nationwide conspiracy to turn students into an army of cultural Marxists. We can't even get the faculty at my school to agree on what rules of order to use to run our meetings.

"'Lost Shtetl': Lithuania opens museum commemorating pre-WWII Jewish life" www.euronews.com/culture/2025...

As far as I can tell, the Trump administration's official belief about trans people is that they both do not exist at all, because "there are only two biological sexes," and also that trans people exist as tremendous dangers to the state.

Says the guy who cares so deeply about fighting antisemitism.

Every single day, our extremist government chooses more death and destruction. After almost two years of bombing and displacement, Palestinians, including children, the elderly and disabled, are facing new horrors every day. The hostages are still suffering in captivity. (1/2)

Everything I ever manage to do is a mix of anxiety and determination, though.

It's notable that so many of the people who want to honor Charlie Kirk while ignoring his actual words are comparing him to Martin Luther King, Jr. - a comparison that Kirk himself would presumably have rejected, since he openly disdained Dr. King. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

"The Israeli airstrikes that killed 31 journalists and media support workers in Yemen earlier this month were the second-deadliest attack ever on the press, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists." www.nbcnews.com/world/yemen/...

Oh, it "raises questions" about that, does it?

This is a factual question, not a normative one. Americans are simply wrong about this, as lots of empirical studies have documented.

We spent a whole decades hearing comedians complain about how they can't say jokes anymore because of oversensitive woke college students who can't take a joke. Meanwhile, Louis CK is headlining Madison Square Garden and Jimmy Kimmel is out of work.

This explains quite a lot about how people think about Jews in the US, actually.

A pope died in the year 2025 and I don't think I heard as much about it in the media as I'm hearing about the death of Charlie Kirk.

Jews and stomach problems have apparently been a theme for a while. (from Berakhot 55a)

"It’s about memory and grief, about how much of your culture you can save and how much you leave behind." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/a...

A lot of people on the post-liberal right like to compare the contemporary United States to the Weimar Republic, supposedly because we, too, are decadent and depraved. Do they realize this makes them the fascists in this analogy?

"With the mission of democratic education itself at stake, I expected resistance, even from those who were administering the neoliberal university as a corporate autocracy, treating education as an enhancement of human capital." www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

"First they come for those who celebrate murder, then they come for anyone who questions the hagiography of the victim, then they go after anyone who quotes the victim’s own words, then they silence anyone who objects to the repression itself." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

97% of my thoughts about myself are bad; you don’t see me trying to outlaw thinking.

Gut Shabbos and Shabbat Shalom to everyone except for Stephen Miller. I hope he has an awful one.

We are going to have to fight hard for a world in which human creativity still matters.

Latvian-American novelist and filmmaker Michael Idov says Trump is trying to exercise control over American media more quickly than Putin moved to take over Russian media. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

A new poll of employees at American Jewish community organizations finds that fewer than a quarter feel hopeful about the future, and that "internal communal division" is a greater cause of hopelessness than either antisemitism or Israel-Palestine. www.timesofisrael.com/survey-us-je...

Publishing in the "New York Times," February 4, 1939.

If this is "doing politics the right way," what does the wrong way look like?

We have a liberal party in America, the Democratic Party. They are deeply committed to procedural liberalism and to following the rules as they understand them. The problem is that the illiberal party is winning at every turn.

As terrible as American politics are right now, we have a handful of decent elected officials nationwide who are worthy of support. Does the UK have a single one who isn't either a hateful bigot, a feckless clown, or both? A single politician worthy of support?