🎧 “Back when the alt-right was called the alt-right… people used to not believe me when I said how central the Jews and the so-called Jewish question were to that project.”

There is no excuse for Finkelstein doing this. Nothing defensible. And even if you completely separated everything he said from what Owen’s did, he still relied on conspiracy theories and negative stereotypes about Jews. In 2025, we don’t need any of this to talk about Israel.

For those who aren't keeping up, Mamdani is a Zionist now (for condeming swastika graffiti on a yeshiva)

Re-posting my Halakhic argument for humanitarian aid in Gaza: thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoug...

The Jewish right discovering in real time that the Trumpist right, and the open bigotries it has unleashed upon the US body politic, is not in fact going to spare Jews, is quite a trip.

Re-posting my recent Halakhic article on starvation in war (especially Gaza): thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoug...

Here is a version of my article on the starvation of Gaza that better enables one to read the footnotes: thelehrhaus.com/download/los...

Re-posting my recent Halakhic article on starvation in war (especially Gaza): thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoug...

My Halakhic argument against the starvation of Gaza: thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoug...

A very erudite and impressively well-cited Halakhic argument by @motownrabbi.bsky.social against the permissibility of starvation in Gaza as a legally or morally acceptable tool of war. Well worth reading. thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoug...

My Halakhic argument against the starvation of Gaza: thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoug...

They did the thing

(((Powerful people)))

I am once again asking you, people of Bluesky, to please not try to make every single post by a Jew about Palestine. What’s happening must be talked about. And is being talked about. And Jews are entitled to engage in their Judaism in other ways as well.

I’d like to toot my own horn and say that I blew Shofar pretty decently over Rosh Hashanah.

Maimonides on “wokeness”: www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Tora...

This source sheet presents the sources for why many have the custom to wear a new suit or eat a new fruit on the second night of Rosh Hashanah: www.sefaria.org/sheets/79348...

This source sheet is on the idea of Shofar as both a cry and a wake up call: www.sefaria.org/sheets/43316...

Here are some of my Sefaria source sheets on Rosh Hashanah: The first is on the Rosh Hashanah simanim: www.sefaria.org/sheets/79306...

Facts don’t care about your feelings.

My article from Fragments by @truahrabbis.bsky.social discussing voting and democracy from a analytical Halakhic perspective: truah.org/resources/fr...

This is a generous thread about what "antisemitism" means. But sadly, most people who say "antisemitism doesn't just refer to Jews so it's not just about Jews / X person can't be an antisemite" do not care about antisemitism. They just want to deflect and divert any discussion of antisemitism.

Some people on the left think just repeating “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” frees them from the work of thinking critically about what is and is not antisemitic. And a whole lot of people on the right think being a strong Zionist functions as a “get out of antisemitism free card.”

The true statement is "Anti-Zionism is not synonymous with antisemitism, and it is possible to have a principled critique of Zionism that is not antisemitic. But anti-Zionism can also easily intersect with antisemitism, and calls to 'hunt down Zionists' in Europe clearly cross that line."

This is the nuance lost by both the organizations that say "anti-Zionism is antisemitism" in all cases, and those on the other side who say "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism." Critiques of Israeli statehood made in Palestine are *very* different from calls to "hunt down Zionists" in European cities.

Protesting an anti-war Israeli academic using misogyny and antisemitism will definitely somehow fix this www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/n...

An important teaching about leadership in today’s #dafyomi : www.sefaria.org/Horayot.10b.2

LOL, imagine being someone who claims to be historically literate (Hazony) who is then surprised that your right wing nationalist movement has attracted some antisemites.

"Only the PC police care about antisemitism, which is actually fine in 2025 because of Zionism." This is what a lot of people in my replies sound like today.

A lot of people on the extremely online left right now seem to interpret "Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" to mean "all antisemitism is actually fine if you just say it's anti-Zionism."

I’m enjoying the people in the replies proving the point.

If you, an atheist, make a statement about religion as a whole, & someone from a non-Christian religion says, "Actually, we don't believe that or practice that way," the correct response is, "Huh, I didn't realize that," & NOT "nuh-uh, you're in denial about your own faith that I've never studied."

I’m setting the over/under for “Pharisees” references at 51.

This structurally forces them into an intense and largely ahistorical Islamophobia, as the only place to offload ontological anti-Judaism without implicating the Christians they want to claim as political allies today.

A major obstacle for folks attempting to defend democracy is that a perfectly accurate description of what Trump is attempting sounds like hysterical conspiracy theorizing to a lot of people. We default to “c’mon, that can’t happen here”—which is exactly why it can.

Obama got attacked as a socialist or communist because he said entrepreneurs were helped by government building infrastructure and educating folks. Now Trump is literally making the U.S. a part owner of private companies.

My mentions are filled with people simultaneously insisting that no one on the left is saying my Israeli Jewish loved ones are all genocidal Nazis who deserve to be harmed unless they leave, and also people saying exactly that about my Israeli Jewish loved ones. All because I dared to criticize DSA.

Should be easy to criticise Israeli policy normally, and yet so many fail to do that.

a very bleak development in terms of my view of the world in the last few years has been both ‘the Israeli govt is much worse than I thought and deserves an enormous amount of criticism’ and ‘yeah a lot of people geniunely are just low-grade antisemitic’ both apparently being true.

With the horrors of what the Israeli govt is doing, there is an audience for Israel-critical political and media figures. You would rather that audience be served by someone like Mamdani, who distinguishes between Jews and the state of Israel, and not the people who are likely to come in after him.

And on Israel-Palestine, I am never sure if I am going to encounter someone who thinks Israel is committing genocide (as I do) but still envisions some kind of federated long-term political settlement, or someone who openly supports Hamas and is happy to tell every Jew in I-P to return to Poland.

People treat "Zionism is not Judaism" or "Antizionism is not antisemitism" as incantations. Leo Frank trutherism isn't antisemitic, because Israel exists 100 years later?

I increasingly feel left-leaning Americans who feel righteous about yelling at random Jews about Israel are just using antisemitism to avoid facing up to the responsibility Americans have to stop the horrible things that *our* United States government is doing.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but I’m seeing a really troubling amount of people who are convinced that antisemitism is anti-Zionism

I have some bad news for you about the histories of a lot of the other constructs we define as "world religions."