"Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys." www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-...
Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, Sarah Lawrence College. PhD in Religious Studies, University of Chicago. Globalist elite and Thing-in-Itself-hating Jew. Husband of @petticoatshrink.bsky.social. He/Him/הוא/ער
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"Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys." www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-...
I do not want to live in a world where this becomes normalized.
It's notable that Nadler is framing his own retirement as a sort of symbolic death of liberal Zionism.
Oh, you mean it isn't actually about fighting crime?
This is a worthwhile discussion of the unhelpful conflations that make the “right to exist” question fruitless. archive.is/wxZOq
This is about as close to an academic consensus as one ever sees on issues like this: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
The people doing this are almost certainly going to hand another rhetorical tool to people who want to deny the Holocaust entirely. And you can likely apply that to any mass atrocity. www.bbc.com/news/article...
The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide declared today that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The resolution was supported by 86% of those voting. www.pbs.org/newshour/amp...
First day of teaching today, and I'm going to tell my students that taking liberal arts classes at a time when a lot of the country wants the liberal arts to die is an act of resistance. Reading books and taking the time to sit with them and refusing easy answers is an act of resistance.
I think about this sometimes.
There’s no reason to do this except racism: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/w...
Along similar lines, I really do not want to end up in a position of having to defend Big Pharma, because it is for so many reasons a deeply malign force in the world today. But the leading critics of Big Pharma in the US right now are somehow even worse than what they're criticizing.
"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.
Going to use this in class to explain the difference between analytic and continental philosophy to first-year undergrads.
Been receiving messages like this all day, not because I said anything at all positive about the state of Israel or its actions, but because I dared to suggest that some people who think of themselves as being on the left are being radicalized to antisemitism in the name of anti-Zionism.
I have consistently said I believe Israel is committing genocide and that Netanyahu is a war criminal who should be in prison in The Hague. Ask yourself why you feel the need to show up in the responses of a random Jewish person talking about antisemitism and demand an answer to this.
Most Zionists are in fact Christian, not Jewish. There are more Christian Zionists in the US (at least 30 million) than Jews in the whole world (roughly 16 million). If your criticism of Zionism as an ideology cannot account for this fact, you might be motivated by antisemitism.
My first day of the academic year is tomorrow, Labor Day, which means I’m spending my Labor Day weekend finalizing course preparations. This is why Americans hate academia.
Releasing AI-generated music needs to be stigmatized as widely as possible.
I should probably disable comments and quotes on this, so as not to make this site totally unusable for myself, but I actually think it's more illustrative to leave them open so people can see the response to this point.
Never great when an interview with a public health official ends with, "In summary, we're screwed." www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...
A lot of people on the right are manipulating concerns about misogyny and sexism to push extreme violence against the trans community. This does not mean misogyny and sexism are not very real problems. This is a post about antisemitism.
And the responses to this post in my comments are illustrating the point extremely well.
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."
"Taylor Lorenz is actually Palestinian" is somehow the logical endpoint to the "We can't criticize anyone who does something grossly antisemitic if they say it's just about Israel" discourse on the left right now.
The blanked out word is not, in fact, “Jews.” It’s a word that is ostensibly a synonym for “Jews” but is actually quite a bit worse.
It's very possible that the Nazis would have achieved the atomic bomb first if they had not prioritized their murderous hatred of Jews above their desire for scientific advancement. Fascism always works this way.
This statement from Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship academic seminary of the Conservative movement, and also a child refugee from Nazism, is very worth wrestling with. peterbeinart.substack.com/p/a-stain-on...
This is just an explicit roadmap to genocide. This is the kind of document that is going to show up in future textbooks documenting war crimes - if we still have future history textbooks, that is.
Walter Benjamin predicted that a technology of reproduction like AI would have just been immediately used for fascist ends. Now we're not just reproducing images; we're reproducing facsimiles of ideas that were already horrific decades ago.
This is why the people who respond to Trump's unlawful power grabs with, "Oh, the law doesn't matter now; he can do whatever he wants" are so self-defeating. Part of how fascism works is creating its own reality through words themselves. It matters to stand up and say, "He doesn't have that power."
"Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new “AI-powered, smart cities” to be built in Gaza."
The Trump administration is explicitly planning to ethnically cleanse all two million Palestinians in Gaza: www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
The chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel has canceled his scheduled trip to South Africa, out of fears that he could be arrested for war crimes. www.timesofisrael.com/fearing-arre...
The genuinely indefensible atrocities that the Israeli government is committing in Gaza are giving a lot of people a permission structure to be openly antisemitic.
Chris Van Hollen is interesting because he makes a center-left case for Palestine. He argues for Palestinian rights not on leftist but on liberal grounds. It is highly philosophically coherent to do that, and yet few politicians do.
This is in reference to a post from a neo-Nazi web forum that literally uses the word “k*kes,” and still some leftists will jump in with, “actually, they’re just being anti-Zionists.”
For two generations after World War II, the kind of open antisemitism that was commonplace in European culture in the late 19th century become broadly culturally unacceptable. We're seeing what happens when the cultural gatekeepers no longer have any power, and conspiracism is in full blossom.
The blacked-out word here refers to Jews. Those are the segments of the internet where Taylor Lorenz is hanging out now. We're seeing how easy it is to radicalize a person into antisemitism in real time.
I have to start teaching for the academic year on Labor Day, and this is why Americans hate academia.
"Journalists, at their essence, epitomize the intellectual in Edward Said’s telling, especially now when fascism plagues the country in which he lived and genocide threatens the existence of the people to whom he belonged." www.bostonreview.net/articles/isr...
The administration that cares so deeply about fighting antisemitism.
The US Holocaust Museum is planning to "upgrade" its exhibit on the US response to Nazi Germany, and staff are concerned the Trump administration wants to downplay the extent to which the Immigration Act of 1924 doomed more European Jews to die. abcnews.go.com/US/upcoming-...
“Everyone here is celebrating a culture and drawing on community. It’s about joy and resilience. It’s not just a culture being preserved; we’re living our Yiddish.” www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/...
"Whether it’s in the Soviet Union or whether it is in East Germany or in the darkest places and times, writers have managed to survive. Their work has survived." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/m...
"We have lost our moral center if we don't care that a 5-year-old child dies from hunger. It's absolutely frightening to think what the long-term implications of this will be. The war will end one day, but where will we go back to?" archive.ph/wD1ln#select...
"Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav said that if no one is against you, you are not saying anything." archive.ph/wD1ln#select...
I also see a future that I don’t want to live in.
It’s one social media post inspired by a visit to a kibbutz where people were killed on October 7th. If he never talked about Palestinian suffering, I would agree with you, but he does.
Like, this is a really weird response to a post where Senator Van Hollen is literally calling for a ceasefire and end to the war! bsky.app/profile/dyla...
Chris Van Hollen is literally calling for a ceasefire and end to the war here, and he has been more pro-Palestine than all but maybe one or two other senators, but a lot of the replies here seem angry at him for deigning to talk to Israelis at all.
Gut Shabbos and Shabbat Shalom to everyone except for Stephen Miller. I hope he has a bad one.
"Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe." www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/hitl...
I don't think we should trust anyone from the House of Habsburg on how to respond to shootings.
A lot of people want the criteria for academic Jewish Studies jobs to be not just the quality of research and teaching, but to essentially demand professors be Hillel directors, too. This demand would destroy academic Jewish Studies as a field.
My college has openings for four tenure-track positions to begin fall 2026: literatures of the French-speaking Caribbean, Environmental Social Sciences, Religion in the United States, and Public/Medical Sociology. Come be my colleague! slc.peopleadmin.com/postings/sea...
This place really is the new Twitter.
I'm sure this person would hate this comparison, but I am actually sympathetic to how unimaginable trauma can warp a person's moral sensibilities so they become insular and can easily dehumanize an out-group, precisely because I saw it happen with Jews of my family of a certain generation.
There has long been inequality between how crimes committed by Jewish settlers versus Palestinians were treated in the West Bank, rooted in apartheid. What is documented here by B’Tselem is how the Israeli police no longer even pretend to be different than the settler right, even for PR purposes.
I *understand* how someone would come to this conclusion, based on extreme trauma. But if I understand that, I have to also understand how the traumas of Jewish history would lead one to the sort of insular Jewish nationalism that we see at play on the Israeli right. I don't condone that either.
The director of B'Tselem says: "We have reached a situation where in the West Bank settlers are killing Palestinians in broad daylight, and sometimes right in front of the cameras, and nothing happens to them because they have immunity."
For those who read Hebrew, a story about the complete refusal of Israeli police to even try to investigate West Bank settler violence against Palestinian civilians: www.ynet.co.il/news/article...
“Oh, you’re into anti-fascism? Name three albums.”
This is not a random person online, but the author of "Mornings in Jenin," the most widely-read Palestinian novel of all time. This person doesn't want liberation for all, but an exclusionary ethnonationalism of the other side, the flip side of Ben-Gvir or Smotrich.
"It isn't happening and also they deserve that it's happening." www.972mag.com/israelis-atr...
Link for those who are restricted: archive.ph/wD1ln?fbclid...
I'm fascinated by the obviously AI-generated Jewish holiday decorations available for sale right now.
I somehow managed to get a TT job offer in fall 2023, for a job that began last fall 2024, and I feel like I got the last lifeboat off a sinking ship.
Seems bad when the authoritarian national government wants to take over the train lines from the local government.
Fascinating interview with Shaul Magid in "Haaretz": www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...
"We U.S. Jewish Health Professionals Must Stand in Solidarity With Palestinian Health Workers in Gaza" www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025...
These are the same image.
DS9 is my favorite of the ones I've seen so far, but I've heard good things about Lower Decks. Do you recommend it?
Which Star Trek? I had never seen any Star Trek before I got together with my spouse @petticoatshrink.bsky.social, but she is a massive Trekkie and made me watch all of Next Gen and DS9 early in our relationship.
The first large-scale Nazi book burning was on 6 May 1933, when Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin was attacked by Nazi students. It would take decades for science to recover the knowledge about trans-affirming healthcare that was destroyed that day.
There’s just a lot in there that’s worth hearing. And while this topic can’t be responsibly covered without talking about Jews, antisemitism, and Trump’s sinister and disingenuous “anti-antisemitism” crackdown, I was pretty pleased to see it NOT just be 2+ hours of The Jews.
There’s also a lot about how the far right campaign to crush empathy for othered groups extends its tentacles into culture, specifically kid’s entertainment, which is the context for the discussion of the Ms. Rachel backlash. (Did you know the Daily Wire has toddler programming?)
We talk about how anyone who doesn’t deal with the centrality and power of Christian Zionism isn’t taking this issue seriously. She does that. There’s a lot about the sociology and psychology of dehumanization, the role of bystanders. I’ve done anti-genocide education before. This is good stuff.
I agree with this thread but want to make another point. While antisemitism (real and fake) are discussed at length, a lot of this video is just not about (((us))). It is what I and others say we want—anti-genocide advocacy that is not single-mindedly obsessed with The Jews.
Fascinating interview with Yosef Blau, former president of the Religious Zionists of America and mashgiach ruchani at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, on his recent letter from Orthodox rabbis calling for more food aid in Gaza: www.jta.org/2025/08/28/i...
Jews on the left are often rightly critical of much Israel-critical content from non-Jewish leftists, which too often is blind to antisemitism or even repeats antisemitic tropes too readily. But because of that, it is important for us to praise those who get it right. And this was better than most.
On the whole, the most important thing this video did was push beyond a dichotomy of permanent victim and oppressor classes, and point to how historically contingent those categories are. Which is something we all need to remember now.
And I am very aware that I am an academic who can go into great detail about every point made in this video to the point of people being bored, but this is why I publish dry academic articles that a dozen people read and lecture to two dozen undergrads, while this video has been seen by thousands.
To be sure, as a historian, I could quibble with a few points, like I thought it downplayed anti-Judaism in Islam a bit too much. But those are relatively minor points in what was generally a pretty comprehensive history for lay viewers.
In fact, this video took the existence of Zionist-critical non-Orthodox Jews in the US sufficiently seriously that it featured many of them as sources, including @dovekent.bsky.social of Diaspora Alliance and... myself.
I saw some pushback about the video for featuring Neturei Karta, but while there is a larger framework of NK being tokenized by non-Jewish leftists as the "real Jews," this video did not do that, but merely featured them briefly as an example of non-Zionist Orthodox Jews.
And it took seriously the way in which the current federal government discourse about antisemitism makes it impossible for Jews to receive recourse for actual antisemitism they face. So seriously, in fact, that it compared them to moderate Hutus victimized in the Rwandan genocide.
It was not only careful to distinguish Judaism from the state of Israel, but it went into great detail about Christian Zionism as a religious worldview with much greater influence in US politics than Jewish Zionism.
What I appreciated about this video, unlike so much other left-of-center internet content about Gaza from non-Jews, is that it did not dismiss concerns about antisemitism whole cloth, but in fact portrayed left-of-center American Jews as being victims of the current political crisis, too.
I watched this video, out of academic interest, and while I know it has been getting some pushback from some Jewish corners of the internet, I thought it was fairly well done.
And while I am an academic, and will continue to be one as long as I am permitted to teach my subject without governmental or private donor infringement, I think scholars really need to be thinking about ways of preserving and transmitting knowledge outside of the formal academy right now.
It is entirely possible, for example, that we will never get back some of the ancient language knowledge that will be lost by UChicago ending its teaching of these languages, because a whole generation will have nobody who bothers to learn them and pass them on.
I think people assume that knowledge is just something that exists eternally, once achieved, as opposed to something that has to be cultivated and can be lost.
I think the argument here is just "it's inherently MAGA to be a rich married white person, even if you are identifiably a Democrat."
Neturei Karta should not be elevated as representative Jews, but we also owe them the respect to assume that their positions reflect genuinely developed, thought-through political and theological convictions, and are not adopted just to appeal to whoever one accuses them of trying to placate.
There is much to be said about the tokenization of Neturei Karta's religious anti-Zionist stance by non-Jewish leftists, but some of the backlash to that tokenization almost verges on ruling that NK don't really count as part of the Jewish community at all.
To be clear, Orthodox Jewish culture is a totally good and valid subject to tell stories about, but so are other kinds of Jewish families, and faulting this show for not being about a subject that it does not claim to be about seems like the lowest form of criticism.
This "National Review" review of the new Netflix animated show about a Jewish family "Long Story Short" (which I enjoyed) seems to be mad that the show is about largely assimilated non-Orthodox Jews, and not about Orthodox Jews. www.nationalreview.com/2025/08/long...
Walter Benjamin warned us about this. Fascism is all about reproducing aesthetics artificially until the artificiality itself becomes more real than what it imitates.
Of all the people who should not be criticizing George Soros for using his money to influence politics, Elon Musk is pretty high up on that list.
