ChayaLeah

I don’t care that this idiot is popular. I care that the mainstream institutions, trying to catch some of that retard fairy dust, is pretending he’s anything but a foaming-at-the-mouth dumbass. We are surrounded by cowards.

Hezbollah occupies Lebanon. The Islamist regime occupies Iran. The Houthis occupy Yemen. Hamas occupies Gaza. Four occupations. One Islamist ideology. Khomeini built it. Khamenei expanded it. Suleimani, Nasrallah and Sinwar armed it. They’re dead. Now it is breaking apart.

@curatorWH @bungarsargon @MattWelch check this out

The Forward, New York, August 27, 1909. The article introduces the fundamentals of baseball in Yiddish,to new Jewish immigrants coming to the United States.

Thank you to @ezraklein for “jewsplaining” Hasan Piker to the rest of us. What a joke. Whatever brand of politics makes you apologize for this loser is pretty gross.

The Arab Word is Watching a Different War: Three reasons why it has been difficult to understand the Arab position: The first is the Arab relationship with Iran. From the vantage point of Brussels or London, Iran presents itself as a resistance movement with a grievance against American hegemony and Israeli occupation, and this presentation maps comfortably onto familiar Western anticolonial frameworks. What it does not map onto is the lived experience of Arab populations in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and across the Gulf. In those countries, Iran's presence meant Hezbollah holding the Lebanese state hostage to Tehran's decisions, thirty-five armed factions in Iraq drawing salaries from Iranian funds channeled through the Iraqi national treasury, and Houthi commanders answering to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while firing on Arab civilians from Yemeni soil. Freedom is not the word any serious Arab observer would use for what Iran brought. Indeed, the Arab world's quarrel with Iran runs far deeper than American bases or Israeli airstrikes. What drives it is the systematic subversion of Arab sovereignty by a foreign power that uses the language of Islamic solidarity as cover for an imperial project conducted through proxies. The second dimension is the proxy question itself, where Western analysis fails most comprehensively. Iran goes far beyond supporting armed groups. Parallel state structures get built inside Arab countries, financial systems get captured, and political figures get installed who owe their existence and survival entirely to Tehran. The Iranians who have administered this project understand it as the export of a revolution, but what Arab populations have experienced is closer to a colonial occupation conducted through intermediaries, and as of now, they’re not mourning the Islamic Republic. When Westerners treat these proxy networks as instruments of legitimate resistance rather than as mechanisms of subjugation, they endorse an imperial project while believing themselves to be opposing one, and as a matter of fact, make themselves the legitimizing force behind Iran’s war against the Arab world. The third dimension is the most counterintuitive for a Western audience, and it is the one most consequential for how the current war is understood and misunderstood. For Arab nationalists, including secular nationalists and even those with deep reservations about Israeli policy, Iran represents a greater and more immediate threat than Israel does. This is a position that Western media are structurally ill-equipped to render intelligible, because Western discourse on the Middle East has been organized for decades around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the primary axis of regional injustice. The result is that when Western governments and Western publics take strong positions against Israel’s actions against Iran’s operations, they believe themselves to be standing with the Arab world. In reality, they are advancing a position that the Arab world does not share and has not asked for, while ignoring the threat that Arab governments and Arab populations actually live with. The rhetorical use of Israel as a perpetual alibi for Iranian aggression has been one of the Islamic Republic’s most durable tools, and Western opinion has served as the unwitting amplifier of that tool across the entire duration of the Islamic Republic’s existence. open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…

Trump in 2016: "I stand with Israel." Trump in 2020: "I stand with Israel" Trump in 2024: "I stand with Israel" Ex-MAGA in 2026 after voting Trump 3 times: "I wish I never voted for him. How could I have possibly known that he supported Israel?!?!?!??!?!?!?!??!?!??!?!? "😡

Sad to hear about @RepEliotEngel. He was a real mentsch and we are worse off without him.

What could Israel have done to prevent its continuing fall in U.S. public opinion? @SethAMandel has the answer - all Israel had to do was “let Iran and its proxies get away with Nazi levels of violence against Jews.” Hard pass. We’ll take being hated over being butchered. commentary.org/seth-mandel/wh…

The accusation of "Israel First" was always not just a lie but a psyop. It's the same as a Woke calling you a racist or transphobe. It's absolutely possible to support and prioritize America and to think Israel is a force for good worth backing.

You can be totally "America First" and simultaneously recognize that Israel is a force for good in the world and is even worth partnering with in many things you also support.

Once upon a time I had never heard of Hasan Piker or Candace Owens or Dave Smith or Ana Kasparian. Those were nice times.

Fun fact: Observant Jewish life would inspire most young American conservatives tremendously if they saw it for real and ditched the propaganda against it.

In most countries, young voters don’t typically see their most left-leaning contemporaries go to a bohemian music festival only to be slaughtered, kidnapped, burned, and raped by savage barbarians who flooded across the border. That can push your politics rightward.

Delighted to be a new contributing writer to @thedispatch. My new essay; "How central should antisemitism be to our communal agenda? I find myself holding a response—quite literally—in my hands. It is the Haggadah" thedispatch.com/article/judais…

On jewish optimism, Passover, how historical is the Bible and how forgivable is Kanye West? My discussion with the Ask a Jew's @yaelbt and @saysCL podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask…

We set out to show going to the dentist can actually be fun! Instead of checking teeth, we serve chicken wings and watch sports. (We're not certified dentists). cooking.nytimes.com/article/homema…

Today 🇮🇱 Israel becomes the first country in the entire Middle East to adopt the death penalty (except for 🇮🇷 Iran, 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia, 🇮🇶 Iraq, 🇪🇬 Egypt, 🇸🇾 Syria, 🇯🇴 Jordan,🇰🇼 Kuwait, 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates, 🇶🇦 Qatar, 🇾🇪 Yemen, 🇧🇭 Bahrain, and🇴🇲 Oman).

If you’ve never experienced Passover in an Orthodox Jewish home, it’s almost impossible to understand how far it actually goes. People throw around the phrase “spring cleaning” and think that’s what it is. It’s not. It’s a full teardown and rebuild of how you live inside your own house, all for just one week. It doesn’t start a few days before the holiday. It starts weeks, sometimes even months earlier. Every cabinet gets emptied, every shelf is wiped down, and every corner is checked. We’re not just cleaning dirt, we’re on the hunt for chametz, any leavened grain product. Bread, cookies, crumbs, even something that fell behind a couch months ago. You move appliances, you vacuum inside drawers, you scrub surfaces you normally wouldn’t even think about, like high walls. Some people take apart their ovens, some pour boiling water over countertops, others line entire kitchens with foil or special coverings so nothing that touched chametz during the year comes into contact with Pesach food. And that’s just the beginning. In many homes, especially more careful or Hasidic ones, cleaning alone isn’t enough. The entire system gets replaced. Separate dishes, separate pots, separate utensils that were never used with chametz all year. Some families have full Pesach kitchens packed away in boxes eleven months of the year. And it goes further. In certain homes, you won’t eat there unless you know exactly how that kitchen was prepared, down to the smallest detail, and many won’t eat anything that wasn’t prepared in their own home, even if it’s from close friends. Then comes the halachic process. You don’t just clean and call it a day. There’s bedikat chametz, the formal search the night before Pesach, done with a candle and a blessing, where pieces of bread are traditionally placed around the house and then found. The next morning is biur chametz, burning whatever remains. Anything you can’t realistically get rid of gets sold through a rabbi in a formal transaction called mechirat chametz, because owning chametz on Pesach is forbidden, not just eating it. Then the eating itself changes completely. For seven or eight days depending on where you are, there is no bread, no pasta, no flour products unless they are specifically made as matzah, which is unleavened bread made quickly so it doesn’t rise. And matzah itself is a whole world. It has to be made in under 18 minutes from the moment water touches flour, because otherwise it could start fermenting and become chametz. Some only eat shmurah matzah, which means matzah that has been supervised from the time the wheat was harvested to make sure it never came into contact with moisture. Others insist on handmade matzah, not machine. There are also families who won’t eat anything that has even a question of moisture that could have caused fermentation. Then you have kitniyot, which is legumes and similar foods like rice, corn, beans, and peanuts, which adds another layer. Ashkenazi Jews, Jews of European descent, traditionally don’t eat these on Pesach. Sephardic Jews, from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds, generally do. So even within Orthodox Judaism, what your Pesach looks like depends on your background. One family is eating rice, and another wouldn’t let it into the house. One family is comfortable with certain processed Pesach foods, another will only eat simple, basic items they prepared themselves. And it keeps going. Some peel every vegetable because maybe something touched it in a factory. Others won’t use any product unless it has a very specific Pesach certification, meaning rabbinic approval that it meets all Passover standards. Many won’t eat out at all, not even in kosher restaurants, because they don’t trust anyone else’s standards. In certain homes, even food prepared before Pesach won’t be touched once the holiday starts. Everything is fresh, controlled, and intentional. Then comes the Seder. It’s not just a meal. It’s a structured reliving of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, guided step by step through the Haggadah, with four cups of wine, matzah on the table, maror eaten to feel the bitterness, korech put together like a reminder you can actually taste, children asking questions, and everyone leaning like free people. It’s built to make it feel like you yourself left Egypt. And that’s the point behind all of this. We’re not just avoiding bread because of some random restriction. Chametz represents inflation, ego, something that rises. Matzah is simple, flat, controlled. The Torah commands us to remember the Exodus as if you yourself left Egypt. All the cleaning, all the restrictions, all the effort, it forces you to step out of your normal life and enter a completely different mode. You feel it physically. Your house looks different, your kitchen functions differently, your diet changes, your schedule changes. You can’t ignore it even if you wanted to. And if you step back, it’s actually insane in the most literal sense. Thousands of years later, Jews are still removing every crumb of bread from their homes because of something that happened in Egypt. Entire industries exist around this. Families plan their lives around it. Kids grow up expecting it as normal. There is no other nation on earth that has maintained something this detailed, this demanding, and this consistent for this long. Empires came and went, languages disappeared, cultures vanished, and Jews are still arguing over how to kasher a countertop and whether a product is acceptable for Pesach. You can call it stubbornness, but it’s more than that. It’s continuity, it’s identity, it’s a direct line from the Torah to a kitchen in Brooklyn in 2026. And for those of us who live it, it’s real. It’s exhausting, it’s expensive, it’s sometimes overwhelming. But it’s also something we take seriously in a way that barely exists anywhere else. Because this is what it means to be part of Am Yisrael, not just believing something but living it in a way that shapes your entire life, down to the crumbs you can’t keep in your house for one week a year. And after all of that, after the cleaning, the stress, the shopping, the kashering, all the details that never seem to end, you sit down at the Seder with your family and it all comes together. You look around the table, your kids are asking the same questions kids have asked for generations, and you realize it worked. This whole system actually worked. It kept us the same people. So wherever you are, whatever your level, whether your kitchen looks like a full Pesach operation or you’re just doing what you can, there’s something powerful about being part of this. Wishing you a happy and kosher Pesach, wherever you are, physically and spiritually.

Queen Joan

I have instructed the relevant authorities that Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch, be granted full and immediate access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Over the past several days, Iran has repeatedly targeted the holy sites of all three monotheistic religions in Jerusalem with ballistic missiles. In one strike, missile fragments crashed meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. To protect worshippers, Israel asked members of all faiths to temporarily abstain from worshipping at the Christian, Muslim and Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City. Today, out of special concern for his safety, Cardinal Pizzaballa was asked to refrain from holding mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Even though I understand this concern, as soon as I learned about the incident with Cardinal Pizzaballa, I instructed the authorities to enable the Patriarch to hold services as he wishes.