Tweet from Reverend Jordan Wells: "Why So Many Protestants Are Done with the Modern Papacy I respect Catholicism deeply, but this is exactly why so many Protestants have major issues with the current direction of the Vatican. The Pope’s clear liberal political bent is impossible to defend."
This is an incredible tweet.
"These are the last visible traces of lives that have been destroyed." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/a...
As opposed to all the moments when he is calm and collected?
I'm fine with this decision. These definitions cause more trouble than benefit, and the government does not have such formalized definitions of other forms of bigotry. www.timesofisrael.com/mamdani-admi...
"An Estonian Holocaust memorial was discovered to have been destroyed on Friday, according to the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board and the Estonian Jewish Community." www.jpost.com/diaspora/ant...
I suppose Trump has made a "special contribution to the Jewish people," in that I feel a lot less safe and more tenuous in my life as an American Jew now than I did in 2016. So there's that. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...
Where I'm more sympathetic is I've seen at least a few Jewish students go, in years at college, from Zionism to rejecting it, learning about the Bund and that history for the first time, then coming to some middle path beyond total rejection or acceptance of Zionism in the end.
I actually think we disagree less than you think. I agree defining a Jewish identity solely in opposition to a nation-state where one does not live is as much of a trap as defining it in through unchallenged support of that state. We need some sort of other path.
Sources: www.timesofisrael.com/half-of-us-j...
www.timesofisrael.com/new-poll-72-...
Half of American Jewish voters believe Trump is personally antisemitic. Nearly three-quarters believe Trump bears some personal responsibility for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
Meanwhile, Israel is giving him a prize for "special contribution to the Jewish people."
It's like the Israeli government is actively trying to alienate more young American Jews from the state of Israel. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...
When I say Zionism has failed to reduce antisemitism today, I'm not saying Bundism has done any better at doing so. It hasn't! But huge numbers of American Jews are being told the former is the answer for them, and very few are being told the latter.
And believe it or not, I am not trying to defend neo-Bundism as the answer. I don't think it is. I am saying it is at least a comprehensible or understandable response to the fact that young Jews in the US are not being offered the answer they need.
I do feel disillusioned with the contemporary left! I say that often. But here I am trying to express disillusionment with a lot of establishment Jewish organizations in the United States.
The truth is the question of whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza is a legal question, and while it is probably inevitable that it will become culturally conflated with Holocaust memory, the Holocaust has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the genocide allegation against the Israeli state.
"This word is key to this book and to the entire Gazology genre: Genocide is the equivalent of water in Dune, the substance that moves the storyline along. If the Jews have committed genocide, everyone else can finally stop thinking about the genocide committed against them, can turn without guilt against the state that allowed Jews to protect themselves for the first time, and can sink with relief back into pre-Holocaust thought patterns—because by committing the ultimate evil, the Jews have finally proved that those thought patterns were correct. The accusation serves to justify violence against Israelis, including, retroactively, the violence of October 7, thus making them responsible for a war launched by Palestinians. The “Gaza genocide” may be an obvious falsehood, but it’s an irresistible story."
I'm sure there will be people who do this - think "the Jews have now committed genocide, so I get to stop caring about the Holocaust" - but the reverse reasoning is also possible - "People won't care about the Holocaust if Israel committed genocide, so Israel can't have committed genocide."
And in fact, the turn away from a positive vision of Jewish integration into the community of nations through statehood, toward a purely negative Judeopessimist vision, is why Shaul Magid argues that Meir Kahane was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.
Of course, one can very easily and coherently make the Judeopessimist argument that the persistence of antisemitism actually proves the need for a Jewish state. But if so, at least acknowledge that you are arguing *against* the vision of the early political Zionists, not in favor of it.
Yes, and on these specific self-defined terms, the project has clearly failed. This is what I was trying to say, said better by @yairwallach.bsky.social.
So when I say "Zionism has failed in its stated goal of normalizing the Jews and reducing antisemitism," I am actually taking the early Zionist thinkers very seriously in their own arguments for their vision. Don't agree with that? Take it up with Hess, Pinsker, and Herzl.
See also Moses Hess, who argues in "Rome and Jerusalem" that Jews are hated for denying that they are in fact a nation of people, and that only by becoming a nation can they reduce the hatred against them and be seen as normal by the rest of the world.
For example, see Leon Pinsker arguing in "Autoemancipation" that creating a Jewish state will undermine the conditions which lead people to hate Jews in the first place.
A lot of people are taking objection to this point in particular, saying that the persistence of anti-Jewish hatred actually proves Zionism was right. And one can argue that, except that the early Zionists like Pinsker and Herzl argued that their vision *would* end or at least reduce antisemitism.
Explicitly yes! Leon Pinsker says this on the first page of "Autoemancipation."
You're arguing with something I didn't say? I never argued non-Jews have no agency. I'm saying early Zionists like Herzl and Pinsker argued that a Jewish state would reduce antisemitism, and on those terms, it has failed.
Oh, so you do understand this concept, do you?
To be clear, this speaker was canceled for posts in which she condemned the murder of Charlie Kirk as completely wrong, and then quoted things he said verbatim. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/u...
Of course it is very possible to make the argument "Antisemitism is eternal and never-ending, and therefore we need a state of our own as a protection against it." But that was not the only argument being made by the early political Zionists.
This is not true though. The early Zionists like Herzl very much believed that making the Jews "a nation among the nations" would normalize them and alleviate the conditions that led to antisemitism, and so decrease antisemitism all across the world.